Going for Broke

Spanish flu of 1918-20 was the worst and biggest pandemic in the modern age. By various estimates it killed 50-100 million people worldwide. In India the death toll was 17.5 million. This was at a time when vaccines and antibiotics were not yet widely used and the pandemic exploded in the wake of a globalisation of different sort, returning soldiers of World War I who carried the flu from the battlefields to all parts of the world. The world survived it. Covid-19 threatens a similar fate which calls for concerted effort from the global community as Deepak Sinha observes in his article.