| India's coronavirus outbreak blew past Brazil's this week to become the world's second biggest. With daily new cases near 100,000, it looks inevitable that the Asian country will soon also surpass the U.S., the current number one. In the world's second most-populous country, which is also among the poorest, that explosive growth in infections threatens devastation beyond what the pandemic has brought so far. The virus has just entered the country's vast rural hinterland, where 70% of its 1.3 billion people live, and healthcare infrastructure is wildly under-resourced. In rural parts of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, there are only 2.7 doctors in the public-health system for every 100,000 people. That means hospitals in these parts of the country will become overwhelmed even faster if cases surge, as already happened in India's megacities of Mumbai and New Delhi, likely resulting in scores of preventable deaths. On a recent trip outside Mumbai, my colleague Dhwani Pandya and I learned about one of these cases: 35-year-old Daniel Tribhuvan, who was the first to die of the coronavirus in his hometown of Boisar. Upon checking into a government hospital in April, the first thing staffers tried to do was move Tribhuvan off to a private facility in Mumbai, until discovering he couldn't pay. Then a doctor didn't see him for three days, and when an elderly man in a bed nearby died, the body wasn't collected for 12 hours.  A vegetable market in Boisar, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh The best way to prevent local hospitals in these places from being overwhelmed is by slowing the virus' spread in the first place with lockdowns and social distancing. But in developing countries like India, these strategies could be fatal, too. India tried a national lockdown earlier this year but was forced to abandon it in June after widespread economic devastation. The country's economy posted the biggest contraction among its peers that quarter, more than 120 million people were put out of work, and an Oxfam survey found half of rural families had to cut back the number of meals they ate, with a quarter forced to beg for food. Our colleague Anurag Kotoky spoke with a rural family of 10 in Uttar Pradesh who only have one person still working, earning about 6,000 rupees ($81) per month. To make up the difference they'd been forced to borrow money at rates as high as 30%. Across the country, suicides are up, unwanted pregnancies have spiked, child labor is on the rise, and ancient prejudices of caste and religion are intensifying. As cases continue to climb around India, its leaders are now faced with an excruciating choice: accept more deaths from the coronavirus, or accept more deaths from trying to slow it down.—Ari Altstedter | 
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