> No, not really.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re pointing to here. The timeline you’re referring to is aligned with what I said - that India was regarded to have managed the pandemic well just a month or two ago. It’s late April now and late Feb is when the new spike began. On March 1, the entire country still had only 15K cases per day on a rolling weekly average - nearly indistinguishable as a new and different pattern. The new spike did not reach prior peaks until early April, which was an unexpectedly fast and unprecedented pace of growth.
> Large political rallies and the government's decision to prematurely reopen everything against better judgement are known key factors in India's outbreak
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with India’s pandemic plan, but they didn’t “reopen everything”, and you should be careful to avoid absolute statements like this which aren’t based on facts. It’s also not possible to describe India’s policy in such a monolithic way since each state has authority to impose its own mandates. That said, after the very harsh initial restrictions, India’s strategy has been less focused on what’s open/unopened and more focused on localized containment, which was highly successful in 2020. Lastly keep in mind that as a democracy, the federal government of India can’t enact arbitrary restrictions. It has to function within the confines of the legal system, political norms, and so on.
I would also caution pointing at political rallies as “known key factors” just because news articles or social media are speculating about it - this is not the same as causal evidence. The best written articles on the India spike (https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19s-ground-zero-shifts-to...) are careful to not decisively blame any one factor. Before the surge, mobility was up generally in the country, independent of elections. The emphasis on elections and rallies, which are only taking place in a few states (this isn’t a general election year), seem to be politically motivated more than anything. As I said earlier other factors like the advent of new variants need to be studied more. The WSJ notes:
> Indian scientists said there hasn’t been enough testing to measure which variants are powering the surge, but the accelerating rate of the spread of infections suggests a more viral form is spreading across the country.