COVID: India Be Ready for Future Surges

The second COVID wave in India has exposed how ill-prepared we were to deal with a surge. We will find it difficult to vaccinate our adult population before next year. If there is another COVID surge in early winter, like last year, then we need to be prepared to deal with it. Key to this is scaling-up testing, building ‘oxygen-bed’ hospitals, increasing medical-grade oxygen supply, constructing good-quality isolation centres, and locking down affected districts early.