In Emerging Economies Like India, New Thinking On Handling Covid
NDTV
With the advantage of watching it play out elsewhere, some are rejiggering policies so as not to eliminate the virus but to live with it.
Developing nations brought to their knees by earlier waves of Covid-19 -- Brazil, India, Indonesia and others -- are only now contending with the highly-contagious omicron variant that has been ripping for weeks through Europe and North America. With the advantage of watching it play out elsewhere, some are rejiggering policies so as not to eliminate the virus but to live with it.
In a way, the idea is old, not new. In 2020, when the pandemic began, leaders of Mexico and Brazil rejected lockdowns and quarantines, saying the damage they'd bring outweighed the sickness and death coronavirus threatened.
They were mostly condemned for their thinking. But today, with large percentages of their populations vaccinated, the cost of lockdowns better understood and the relatively mild nature of omicron, their old approach is gaining new currency in emerging economies around the world.
In fact, on Wednesday President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil called the new variant a "vaccine virus" that could be thought of as "welcome and can in fact signal the end of the pandemic."
