At first (I always wanted to start a column like that), everyone thought that the battle against the coronavirus disease would be a sprint. A 49-day lockout or several week lockouts interspersed with breaks for a few months would flatten the curve, experts said. A post titled The Hammer and the Dance, detailing one such lock-and-fight approach, went viral. The HT staff wrote (and talked about) several research studies and articles that talked about this. How wrong we were all.
The pandemic is now in its seventh month in India. A 68-day lockdown was imposed (albeit with some relaxations after three weeks) when the country had a few hundred cases. Now it has more than four million. And among the large countries affected by the viral disease, it is the only one that has yet seen its peak (or even its first peak).
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At first, everyone was careful. People played by the rules, wore masks, distanced themselves socially, didn’t venture out unless they had to (and when they did, the sensible ones wore gloves even though they made them look funny), asked for help not to come (the generous still paid them), supplied themselves and kept themselves safe.
Even those who couldn’t afford to stay home did – fear and rules kept them there.
At first, after some missteps, especially in the case of migrant workers who were stranded in big cities without jobs and, in some cases, homeless, the central government was proactive. There were daily briefings from the Ministry of Health, expert groups addressing various aspects of the pandemic, sincere efforts to acquire ventilators and personal protective equipment, regular interactions between the Prime Minister and senior ministers, speeches to the nation by the Prime Minister and there was a general feeling that we would overcome.
Things are opening up now, from the feeling that the death rate from infections (see Dispatch 152 for more information) is only around 0.1% in big cities; from the knowledge that masks, hand hygiene and social distancing can prevent infections; but also of a feeling of resignation, fatigue, despair and lack of other options.
Openness cannot be driven by the confidence that the worst is behind, simply because it is not. India is experiencing the most cases in a day, and the most deaths, and there aren’t many rounds about how many recoveries there are (there are likely to be, it’s simple math) or how low the death rate is (it is. but if we accept this with joy, it somehow seems that we are suggesting that a thousand deaths a day is a price worth paying) may hide the fact that we are in the middle of a great crisis.
It is a crisis that has wreaked havoc on lives and livelihoods, transforming life, work, study, and play. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that many of us don’t even talk about the crisis anymore; unfortunately, this includes those who should only be talking about her.
The battle against Covid-19 is a marathon, and it suddenly becomes apparent that many may not have the mental stamina for it. Managing Covid-19 requires respect for science and data (don’t get me started on this); attention to details; understanding of cause, effect and consequences; and readiness to read, listen, assimilate and synthesize.
Policy-makers and political leaders need it (the latter, in the past, have shown tremendous physical and mental stamina for political work), and many have failed. It is still unclear who is leading the fight against the disease in the country: When India surpassed one million cases, Dispatch 108 recommended that the government appoint a Covid Commissioner to spearhead the country’s response, and also a chief of data.
Health administrators need this resistance too, and many of them have also been found wanting. In retrospect, India’s testing strategy was wrong (it took the Indian Medical Research Council until the end of last week to even recommend when which test should be used); did not trace aggressive enough; and even if the isolation system for the infected worked (it didn’t always), people were disappointed in its behavior.
So what should we do now?
Like a faltering marathoner, we all need to refocus and keep running. To quote the best running book ever written (I may have referred to it earlier in this column): “You don’t become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to control the ferocity of your ambition over many days, weeks, months, and (if you can finally come to terms with it) years. Miles’s trial; Miles of Trials “.
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