Podcast: NYT India correspondent on ‘nightmarish’ Delta variant COVID wave
No stranger to danger while reporting, Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times’s South Asia bureau chief, talks about the challenges and horrors of covering a deadly pandemic
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleWelcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week, as Israel is experiencing a minor surge of the Delta, or Indian, variant of the coronavirus, we speak with The New York Times’s South Asia bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman, who is based in New Delhi.
We discuss the horror of the height of the pandemic in India, which the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist describes as every nation’s nightmare.
During the worst weeks and the collapse of India’s medical sector, “Hundreds of thousands of people probably died. We don’t even know, and we’ll probably never know,” says Gettleman.
Prior to his four years in India, Gettleman has reported from war fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, was taken hostage in Fallujah, has covered conflict in Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Yemen and Ethiopia. He is also the author of the 2017 memoir, “Love, Africa.”
Covering the pandemic is different, he said, and much closer to home.
Hear about the overloaded health care system and how India is slowly stymieing the pandemic.
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