Schools must reopen soon or else the consequences for students will be monumental, Harvard Medical School professor Vikram Patel said on Friday, adding that the “extremely extraordinary” uncertainties arising from the pandemic of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) were affecting everyone’s mind. Health.
“I pray that our country moves quickly toward reopening schools. We have the climate in this country to be able to operate outdoor schools where we know that the risk of transmission is very small. We need to do this quickly, otherwise the cost to the generation of children who would have lost almost the entire year of education will be monumental, ”Patel said on the last day of the 18th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
“What we’ve done is completely throw our younger generation under the bus; We have not been able to recognize that this disease, which has almost no risk for those under 18 years of age, however, this demographic group has had to pay the highest price of all to safeguard the rest of the population, ”he said.
Patel, a professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School, said the pandemic had different kinds of impacts on different age groups, but the uncertainties that have arisen due to the pandemic affected everyone’s mental health.
“These extremely extraordinary uncertainties are affecting everyone’s mental health. Whether this will translate into an increased tide of mental illness remains to be seen, but there is always a risk that it will. “
“The strategy of the National Center for Health Systems Resources for the identification of NCDs [non communicable diseases] early in the community using ASHA [accredited social health activists] for screening has now added a depression screener … We now have a tool that ASHAs can use, which is a set of two questions to screen for potential cases of depression who may be asked to go to the health and wellness center or to the health center center for further evaluation. We are also developing scalable ways to train ASHAs to provide psychological treatment for depression, ”said Patel, who co-founded the nonprofit Sangath in 1996 to leverage community resources for psychological therapy.
The two questions seek to find out if the person has very low or depressed mood and loss of interest in daily activities, and this should be followed by a diagnostic evaluation, he said.
“We all know that this particular pandemic and control strategies is really what has affected our mental health in a tremendous way. It has disproportionately affected different sectors of the community; for example, those population groups whose job prospects have been completely extinguished and are already concerned that certain types of work no longer exist, or that they will be considerably reduced after the pandemic ”.
One of the consequences of the pandemic has been the closure of schools, which Patel says perform much more fundamental functions, particularly for the poorest children in India, as they get their main meal of the day. Schools are also the place where children receive a variety of other health care interventions and where they learn to play.
“We have ignored the fact that more than 80% of our children live in homes where they did not have access to a good quality Internet or a device. So we have also made inequalities even worse ”, he added.
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