The next stage of Covid

India's focus needs to move away from the feel-good metrics about recovery rate to the spike round the corner

The Covid epidemic overwhelmed Italy’s medical defences around this time two month ago. From the middle of March, daily new cases went to 4,000 a day, peaking at 6,000 a day on two days towards the end of the month. The week after that, their lockdown hit and the cases began to drop and fell back to 4,000 a day, before tapering off to a couple of hundred daily new cases.

 In Spain, equally badly hit, new cases went up to 7,000 daily in the same period and remained there for six days before beginning to fall from the first