'Success' and lockdowns

Victory in terms of controlling the spread of the disease would require a complete lockdown, as stringent as the one India thought it was imposing

When fighting the coronavirus pandemic, any definition of “success” short of the discovery and swift worldwide delivery of a vaccine was always going to be problematic. This is something that too few governments across the world were willing to admit from the beginning. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, in his earliest speech on the subject in March, when he announced the first lockdown, said that “the Mahabharata was won in 18 days, but the Covid-19 battle will take 21”. But, even then, we should have known this was not true, and the battle would take much longer than that.

Victory