Six months ago, India was struggling. The critically ill patients of Covid-19 were turned away from hospitals. The doctors collapsed out of tiredness.

And in crowded slums, home to millions of the poorest people in the world, the epidemic has spread. Today’s country looks quite different. There have been new cases every day, dropping from a high of more than 90,000 infections in September to just over 10,000 a day in February.

According to COVID19INDIA, a website crowdsourcing Covid-19 data from official sources, on February 9, Delhi reported zero virus deaths for the first time in almost nine months. All of this has happened without drastic measures such as circuit-breaker lockdowns, which have been used in areas such as New Zealand and Australia to get outbreaks under control. Experts agree that several factors are likely to be behind the decrease in the number of cases in India, such as the country’s younger population or the probability of increasing immunity in urban areas.