Vietnam and the Indian state of Kerala curbed covid-19 on the cheap

THE PHONE rings and a doctor picks up. “Sir, we’ve run out of ventilators. What do we do when more patients come?” Soon after, a grim medic explains that the disease they are battling kills three in four victims. There is no vaccine or treatment.

Such talk has become commonplace in the time of covid-19. Yet this scene has nothing to do with the current pandemic. It is the opening of “Virus”, a film that won critical acclaim last year in Mollywood, as the Malayalam-language cinema of the Indian state of Kerala is sometimes known. Styled as a thriller, it tells the true story of the struggle to contain an outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018. The bat-borne pathogen killed 21 out of the 23 people infected. But Kerala tamed Nipah within a month, adopting an all-hands approach that included district-wide curfews, relentless contact-tracing and the quarantine of thousands of potential carriers.

Kerala has used the same simple, cheap tools to fight covid-19, with similarly stellar results. It was the first of India’s 36 states and territories to report a covid-19 case, a medical student who returned in January from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the epidemic started. By March 24th, when Narendra Modi, the prime minister, declared a nationwide lockdown to combat the disease, Kerala accounted for a fifth of India’s cases, more...