On March 24, 2020, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, issued an emergency decree to combat Covid, placing his entire country under lockdown with just four hours’ notice. At the time, The New York Times noted this was “the biggest and most severe action undertaken anywhere to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” The sheer scale and brute force of India’s lockdown set a new precedent and influenced other countries across the Global South to do the same, sometimes regardless of documented Covid spread. Following Modi’s decree, Angola entered lockdown on March 27, Ghana’s main cities shut down on March 30, and Sierra Leone closed its airspace on March 31. The lockdown approach pioneered in Wuhan, China, had gone global.