What history tells us India will do next about COVID-19

There are as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise,” Albert Camus wrote in The Plague, a 1947 existential novel about the disease sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran.

Yet there are no surprises in the fallout of plague and war alike—both unfailingly leave a trail of destruction, both human and economic. That said, it is the response to the situation, often by the state, that ultimately casts a long shadow, ever to be etched in public memory. 

India's response to the novel coronavirus contagion has so far been a mixed …