In the spring of 2021, as India's second COVID-19 wave overwhelmed hospitals from Delhi to Chennai, a quietly dangerous idea was still circulating in the public conversation: that South Asian populations possessed some natural advantage against the coronavirus. Politicians had floated it. Wellness influencers had promoted it. A handful of early projections, built on incomplete data, had seemed to support it. The virus, those voices suggested, would not strike here the way it had struck elsewhere. It did.

The South Asian immunity myth was not a fringe belief. It was repeated often enough that it sometimes substituted for analysis — and, in some cases, for precaution. Understanding how it spread, why it was wrong, and what it cost is now not merely a matter of historical record. It is a matter of public-health preparedness for the next outbreak.

Exception Undercounting During COVID

The first error was statistical. Official COVID-19 death counts across South Asia — particularly in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan — captured only a fraction of the true mortality burden. Where testing was limited and civil registration systems were incomplete, vast numbers of deaths went unrecorded or were attributed to other causes. 

India's official toll through 2021 was reported in the hundreds of thousands. Independent modeling by The Lancet and the World Health Organization subsequently estimated excess deaths — the gap between observed deaths and what would be expected in a normal year — at between four and five million for India alone. A number that appears comforting in an official press release can become a weapon of complacency when it is mistaken for truth.

Excess mortality is the more reliable measure precisely because it is indifferent to classification. It does not ask whether a death was recorded as COVID-19 or as pneumonia or as unknown cause. It simply compares what happened to what should have happened. When that broader lens is applied, the picture across South Asia is not one of exceptional resilience. It is one of exceptional undercounting.

Environmental and Behavioural Conditions

A second, more intellectually interesting explanation for some early outcome differences lies not in biology but in built environment and behavior. Ventilation, crowding, transport patterns, and time spent indoors all shape respiratory transmission in ways that vary enormously across cities and seasons. 

In many parts of South Asia, significant portions of daily life — street commerce, outdoor labor, casual socializing — take place in open or semi-open air, where viral concentrations disperse more readily than in sealed, air-conditioned spaces. Early pandemic waves may have spread more slowly in some settings not because of immunological advantage but because the physical conditions for rapid spread were less uniformly present.

This is a structural story, not a biological one. The same virus behaves differently in a mechanically ventilated office building than in an open-air market. Where conditions favored aerosol accumulation, the virus spread ferociously. Where they did not, transmission lagged. The lesson is that architecture, infrastructure, and patterns of daily life shape pandemic outcomes at least as powerfully as any genetic or immunological factor. That lesson should inform urban planning and public-health investment. It was instead misread as biological destiny.

History and Mythology

South Asia's own history should have inoculated its populations against such reasoning. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated twelve to seventeen million people on the subcontinent — possibly the largest national death toll of any country in that catastrophe, and a figure proportionally devastating even by global standards. The cholera pandemics of the nineteenth century swept repeatedly through the Ganges delta and beyond. The relevant historical pattern is not invincibility. It is a vulnerability amplified by uneven infrastructure and inadequate public-health response. A region with that record has no biological basis for complacency, only historical reason for vigilance.

Yet myths grow in exactly the gaps between memory and evidence. When a crisis appears, at first glance, less severe than feared, people reach for flattering explanations. Cultural pride, traditional wisdom, and the social authority of familiar voices all create conditions in which comforting claims acquire credibility they have not earned. During COVID-19, television personalities promoted herbal concoctions as immunity boosters. Officials suggested that India's BCG vaccination history conferred protection. Social media amplified each reassurance while skepticism about such claims struggled for airtime.

The dangers of this dynamic are behavioral, not merely epistemic. Once people believe they are already protected, they are less likely to test, less likely to isolate, less likely to vaccinate, and less likely to seek care promptly when symptoms appear. Traditional foods and home remedies may support general well-being — that is not in dispute. But they are not substitutes for oxygen therapy when a respiratory virus is attacking lung tissue. The wellness rhetoric that blurred that distinction did not represent cultural pride. It represented a measurable contribution to preventable death.

Counternarratives Against Misinformation

Misinformation survives pandemics because it is emotionally rational. It offers identity and reassurance at precisely the moment when fear and uncertainty are highest. A message that says your people are strong, your traditions protective, your community resilient, is psychologically far more attractive than one that says the virus does not know your culture and does not care about your history. Public-health communication that treats this as merely a problem of false facts to be corrected will keep losing to narratives that understand human motivation. The correction must compete on the level of narrative, not just data.

If South Asia is to be better prepared for the next pandemic — and the next one is a question of when, not whether — it must build on truth rather than comfort. That requires investment in mortality surveillance and civil registration systems capable of producing reliable real-time data. It requires strengthening primary-care infrastructure in rural and peri-urban areas where health system contact is weakest. 

It requires public-health communicators who understand how misinformation travels and how to build credible counter-narratives before the next crisis arrives. And it requires a collective willingness to hold officials and media figures accountable when comforting falsehoods are amplified in place of evidence.

The central lesson of the South Asian immunity myth is not unique to South Asia. No population is biologically exempt from a respiratory pathogen. What protects communities is not mythology, but preparation, surveillance, trust, and timely action. 

When societies learn that lesson before an outbreak peaks, lives are saved. When they learn it during the peak — in crowded hospital corridors, in queues for oxygen cylinders that have run out — the cost is not measured in statistics alone. It is counted in funerals.

(The author is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A scientist in biological chemistry with 30 U.S. patents and a former R&D executive, his work evaluates human behavior and geopolitics through an integrated physicalist lens. An IISc alumnus, he has published public commentary in  prominent outlets. He can be reached at mpreddyinsights.com, https://lnkd.in/gn2zQJbs, mpreddy54@yahoo.com)