T Jacob John and Zarir F Udwadia
Covid-19’s india count has recently surpassed 1.5 million, for horror in sight. In fact, MIT’s model research predicts that by early 2021, India will have surpassed the United States and Brazil to have the highest covid instances in the world, with 290,000 new instances each day. This would be a good time to evaluate the mistakes made along the way, as very important long-term classes are inherent.
Remember that until the Prime Minister, less than four hours in advance, declared the world’s largest, longest and highest restrictive blockade in history, there were fewer than 500 cases and 10 deaths due to the Covid pandemic in India. So what caused exponential accumulation in existing astonishing numbers? Critics say India was the only country to lift its blockade at a time when the number of cases was expanding rather than stabilizing.
Blocking was a brutal tool, at most a measure of productive transience. A lockdown is an opportunity to improve preparation and consolidate medical facilities. But it is very unlikely that decades of forgetting will function properly after a few months of blockage. In fact, if we consider the deaths of many cruelly counterfeit migrants and the history of other non-Covid diseases that have been forgotten because others could not or were too afraid to seek medical assistance, many more lives would have been taken into account. lost that stored through the Indian blockade.
But the genuine roots of this challenge are much deeper: in chronic sub-disinvestment and forgetting public fitness in this country. India has one of the lowest conditions of all countries in the world, consistently less than 2% of GDP. This pandemic has cruelly revealed our weakest link: low-supply and understaffed public hospitals, chronic shortages of hospital beds, and unmotivated and poorly trained staff.
India has one of the lowest densities of fitness workers, with 7 doctors and 17 nurses, consisting of 10,000 inhabitants, compared to a global average of 13.9 and 28.6 respectively. As Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist and physician, says, “Excellence without equity seems to be the top of human rights in fitness care in the 21st century.
Alongside the new coronavirus that caused the pandemic, a more sinister, bizarre and exclusive “moment virus” that affects the minds of national leaders has also become a pandemic. This has led them to believe that the reaction to the coronavirus pandemic will have to be made directly through presidents or prime ministers, no less. Most of the country’s leaders have suffered the virus of the moment.
Leaders who relied on time-tested public aptitude principles in their country of Covid’s grave consequences. Others ignored the experience and principles of public fitness and made critical decisions they could not make. The consequences would be affected, affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.
According to our Constitution, control of the pandemic is the duty of the central government for which it has established several institutions: the Directorate-General for Health Services (DGHS), the National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), the Department of Health Research (DHR) and the Indian Medical Research Council (ICMR). These agencies, at best, did not serve so harmoniously: perhaps it was too much to expect them to sneak into a coherent unit at this crucial time. The Center ignored them, referring to the country’s pandemic reaction to the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) and invoked the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, giving the Center ordinary powers to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic, as if the pandemic did not require public assistance. suitability but civil political and administrative reactions.
Since health care is constitutionally a duty of the state government, the 28 states of India and the 8 territories of the Union have been adequately disadvantaged from a sufficient plan, direction or funds. States relied on mysteriously obscure protection, but had little leadership on the most productive way to proceed. The Center assumed the role of arbitrator rather than coach, sending inspection groups to safe states as if they needed to arbitrate.
ICMR, India’s most sensible medical study organization, has made several confusing decisions. In the first weeks of the pandemic, only the ICMR laboratory, the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune, served as the only control laboratory for a country of 1.38 billion people. When it became clear that it was necessary to expand the control capacity urgently, only all personal laboratories were allowed in the first place. In the end, these insignificant restrictions were lifted.
Even today, as the pandemic approaches its peak, there are only about 1,200 laboratories across the country. UP, for example, has only one PCR verification lab for 30 million people. In the first months of the pandemic, ICMR also insisted that all patients be hospitalized, it is transparent that most can be controlled with good equivalent fortune through home isolation. The initial discharge criteria were equally strict, with 2 negative PCR controls needed before a patient can leave the hospital, resulting in a waste of valuable resources. And the absurd exaggeration that “India’s first vaccine opposed to Covid-19 would be introduced on 15 August” went against all the evidence.
What if some other pandemic looms on the horizon? Surely our reaction deserves to be governed by science and strategy and overseen by experts. This is now the most productive opportunity to create an aptitude-control infrastructure that meets India’s desires and potential. Can a country that does not know how to fight tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera and malaria (to call some endemic diseases in India) be informed about how to manage a new disease, properly described by an expert from Niti Aayog as “one more animal disease? at our zoo?” India has world-class skills; Why not use them and make the most of the day?
T Jacob John is a former professor of virology, CMC Vellore. Zarir F Udwadia is medical representative, Hinduja Hospital – Research Center, Mumbai