Why India’s COVID-19 crisis poses a threat to the whole world

As India continues to grapple with a “tsunami” of COVID-19 cases, deaths and dwindling medical supplies, experts have warned it could spell catastrophe for us all.

Despite India’s insistence, just weeks ago, that it was “in the endgame” of its battle against COVID-19, experts have warned for months that the nation of 1.4 billion people was a ticking time bomb.

And now that that bomb has well and truly exploded – leaving a “tsunami” of coronavirus cases, escalating deaths and dwindling medical supplies in its wake – experts are warning the devastation could have a knock-on effect for the rest of the world.

After recording the worst single-day increase in cases in any country since the pandemic began on Sunday, with 352,991 new infections, India reported another 323,000 cases and 2771 deaths, with no signs of slowing down.

“All the arrows are pointing to real darkness,” University of Michigan epidemiologist and biostatician, Bhramer Mukherjee, told The Atlantic.

As the world’s largest vaccine producer, 92 developing nations rely on India’s Serum Institute for the doses needed to protect their own populations – a supply that has now been constrained by India’s domestic obligations.

The Institute, which is the manufacturer of the AstraZeneca vaccine, has already said it will not be able to meet its international commitments amid India’s domestic shortage, with the country forced to import doses.

RELATED: PM announces India wedding ban

On top of that, COVID-19 is continuing to mutate - experts fear that double and possibly triple-mutant strains could be driving India’s latest surge, prompting concerns the same situation will soon spread further afield.

Efforts to restrict the spread of the B. 1.617 variant, which originated in India, haven’t been enough to prevent its detection in at least 10 other countries, including Britain and America.

Speaking to Business Insider, Professor Mukherjee said that India’s “premature celebration of victory” should serve as a warning to other countries who are seeing case numbers decline.

“The double mutant is now in California, it is in the UK, and similar variants are going to circulate all over the world,” she said.

“It’s really a global problem.”

RELATED: Rich Indians flee crisis on private jets

Family members and relatives wearing protective gear perform final rites of a victim who died of COVID-19. Picture: Manjunath Kiran/AFP

The impact of the devastation there could mean significant consequences for the rest of the world. Picture: Sajjad Hussain/AFP

Local media outlets are reporting long lines at hospitals, ventilator and oxygen shortages and bodies piling up at crematoriums – a situation that might not have been as bad, experts said, if the country had been quicker on its local vaccine distribution and hadn’t loosened social distancing restrictions.

“Many people were thinking by December, January, ‘Oh, we’ve got this under control’,” University of Toronto epidemiologist Prabhat Jha told the publication.

“That turned out to be just hubris and I, among others, had warned that it could really bite back.

“The real lesson here is: respect the virus, respect science. There’s no other way out.”

RELATED: ‘Shocked’: Mystery infection of 52 on flight

On Tuesday afternoon, Prime Minister Scott Morrisonannounced that all direct flights to and from India to Australia would be suspended until May 15, calling the crisis there “a rapidly escalating situation”.

Also announcing that we will send urgently-needed medical supplies there, the PM cautioned against viewing people coming from India through a racial lens or as a “problem we have to solve”. More than 9000 Australians remain in India and want to come home, with 650 of those considered vulnerable.

“These are Australians and Australian residents who need our help and we intend to make sure we are able to restore flights, particularly the repatriation flights, and that those repatriating flights focus on the most vulnerable,” he told reporters.

“We don’t think the answer is to forsake those Australians in India and just shut them off, as some seem to suggest. That’s not what my government is going to do.”

But Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, Krutika Kuppalli, warned that “if India doesn’t get their pandemic under control, it affects the whole world”.

“We can put all the travel restrictions we want, but that’s not going to prevent these mutations from getting to other places.”