Why did COVID fail to take off in India and has now collapsed?

A good article in The Daily Mail (whose covid-19 related reporting has been very good):

Scientists are baffled by the relatively low rate of coronavirus infections in India after at one point it looked as though it might surpass the US as the country with the biggest case toll.

They have suggested many possible explanations for the sudden drop, seen in almost every region, including that some areas of the country may have reached herd immunity or that Indians may have some preexisting protection from the virus.

I had noticed that, and I am as baffled as they are. As the charts in the article show, India had a steady increases in cases/deaths for a few months, followed by an equally steady decline. Peak daily deaths were no higher in India than in the UK, even though India’s population is twenty times as large. There was no exponential growth or fall, it’s a straight line up and a straight line back down.

Brazil had been following a similar straight up and down path to India until late last year, when they were hit by a second wave and/or the Brazil variant. But India is approx. one-fifth of the world population, so you’ve expect there to have been a far few new variants there as well.

Answers on a postcard, your guess is as good as mine.

Something else that baffles me is that the lockdowns/easing don’t seem to have had any discernible impact on daily UK cases/deaths. The easing of the first lockdown in July (in the middle of a gloriously warm summer) had no discernible impact – there was no sudden increase. Numbers didn’t start ticking up until two months later (when it started getting cold).

They peaked and started falling again just before the December lockdown, and they peaked again two months after that. In other words, the number of infections continued going up for nearly two months after the lockdown started. Of course we’ll never know what would have happened without lockdowns, but hey.
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Also, well said Mr Z. From the BBC:

Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi said that it’s his “very strong instinct… to say, those who through no fault of their own other than their work, have to come into contact with the virus, should be prioritised”. He listed shopkeepers, teachers and police officers as those who might be prioritised next.

Yup, give the teachers a jab and let’s get the kids back to school ASAP. I trust that bus drivers are also in his list.