Via the New York Times, a pretty good overview of the situation: Swine Flu Rattles Nerves as It Spreads in India. Excerpt:
India’s vast and densely packed population, coupled with a patchy and fragile health care system, has raised fears that the swine flu pandemic could take a particularly large toll here.
But this abundance of caution comes at a steep price. Testing one sample of suspected swine flu takes six hours and costs $208, according to health officials here.
As of Tuesday, 5,000 people had been tested in India, and 1,193 had been found to have influenza A(H1N1). About half have already recovered. The World Health Organization says that 177,457 cases have been confirmed and that 1,462 people have died worldwide.
Schools and colleges in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, have been closed for a week. The city’s theaters have also closed to halt the spread of the virus.
“I feel things are under control, but to contain the further growth of virus, this is a precautionary measure,” Ashok Chavan, the chief minister of Maharashtra, the western state that includes Mumbai, told reporters.
At first the virus appeared mostly in Maharashtra and another western state, Gujarat. But this week cases have been reported from one of the southernmost states, Kerala, to the northernmost, Jammu and Kashmir.
Laboratories are hard pressed to clear the backlog of collected samples. In Lady Harding Hospital in New Delhi, a swine flu screening center, a third of the samples collected in the last four days still awaited testing.
India’s health experts are divided on the government response. Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s health minister, said that closing schools and colleges was unlikely to help. Dr. A. C. Mishra, director of the National Institute of Virology at Pune in Maharashtra State, the worst affected city, said the government could not be too careful.
But other scientists worried that the government was overreacting. “Initial response of the government was fairly sensible, but they lost the way in the last two days,” said Prof. Mohan Rao, chairman of the Center of Social Medicine and Community Health at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
“Media hype has created a huge storm. Panic is not always a good public policy.”