Colin Murphy: India shows we are a long way from a post-pandemic world

A year into this crisis, Covid-19 still has the ability to inflict considerable suffering of the kind being witnessed in India. How did we let this happen?

Undertakers wearing protective suits carry a body next to a burning funeral pyre of a person who died from Covid-19 in India which has the worst case numbers the world has seen. Picture: Getty

Two and a half thousand years ago, a plague hit Athens.

“Half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets,” Thucydides, the Greek historian, said. Unable to build their own funeral pyres, overwhelmed families would find a pyre already burning and “throw the corpse that they were carrying on top of the other one and go away”.

A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, after all the hard-fought wins we have had and the lessons ...