On Friday, India became the second country in the world, after the US, to register 1 crore Covid-19 infections since the pandemic began. While cases in India have declined drastically since September, the country still figures in the top-5 nations with the highest number of case additions. Even though the government has done well to reopen the economy in a calibrated manner, it still needs to learn from the experiences of Europe and the Americas.
Given there was a lag in the spread of infection in India and the Western world—Europe was grappling with Covid cases in March, and India only had a few hundred infections—a relaxation of norms and flouting of social distancing protocols could lead to resurgence. After all, even though the US had succeeded in bringing down its daily infection count from 80,000 to 30,000, it…