Billions Under Lockdown

The first journalistic overview of India's fight against COVID-19 by one of India's top health reporters.Unlike other books in this space, this will go down as a veritable history of the country's handling of the pandemic, from DAY 1 until the vaccine.The author is a very well respected journalist in the health space and is one of the few trusted voices on news about the pandemic.A journalist for 20 years, Abantika Ghosh is passionate about public health and popular science communication. After graduating from Presidency College, Kolkata, she did her masters in Physiology from the University of Calcutta and has worked with The Statesman, The Times of India and the Indian Express in the past. Currently, she is with ThePrint, where she heads the team covering COVID-19. She is keenly interested in non-cricket sports, is a voracious reader and loves to explore the intersection of politics and society. She lives in New Delhi with two dogs and some books, and can be found on Twitter @abantika77. This is her first book.When WHO first declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020, there was a great deal of apprehension about how India - the country with the highest TB cases and diabetes, inadequate health infrastructure and a population of 1.3 billion - would fare. Between the Janata Curfew and the first vaccinations, a massive machinery has been working as seamlessly as possible to make sure that, despite some missteps and missed infections, India conquers what has been the greatest challenge the world has encountered in decades. Covering the pandemic from the start, first for The Indian Express and then for ThePrint, Abantika Ghosh has had a ringside view of India's battle against the pandemic. A thrilling tale of unnamed thousands battling against a little-understood virus from the frontlines, Billions Under Lockdown brings that gripping theatre and its dramatis personae to life.The first book to tell the detailed story of how a pandemic affected a country of billion-plus people, from the first day to the last."Abantika Ghosh knows India's health infrastructure like no other reporter. In this book, she walks us through the historic year of the pandemic. She tracks both policy and performance, offering us the backstories of the government's first advisory, press conference, lockdowns and unlocks, myths and missteps. Describing a challenging year book-ended by two street protests, replete with nutty mathematical models, lazy theories, and fears over the fastest vaccine development process, she concludes that India was saved either by God or by science. I'd say by both and also by our democracy that let fine reporters like her cover the crisis freely."Tracking a fast-moving pandemic across the vast and varied landscape of India is a challenging task. As a veteran health journalist who has a sharp understanding of both the public health and political dimensions of policy, Abantika is perfectly positioned to be an astute and engaging historian of India's response to the most challenging public health crisis of our times."It is never easy to cover a tragedy - more so a pandemic, where so much is mired in complicated science and difference of opinion. What Abantika has done is to apply the lens of common knowledge with sensitivity to create a story of truth as it happened and unfolded. The brilliant narrative forces you to read on. Great effort at putting things in perspective."