Lakshmana Venkat Kuchi
There are vaccines to fight Coronavirus, developed indigenously and across the world, but do we have a vaccine for stupidity and lack of commonsense ?
This is the main concern arising out of videos of vacationers holidaying and crowding hill stations and beaches throwing caution to the winds, as it were.
“Revenge tourism” is the expression used by health experts and psychologists to explain the phenomenon of people who were not so long ago pleading for hospital beds, oxygen and medicinal drugs to save lives of their near and dear ones now jostling with one another to ‘enjoy nature’ and escaping jailed lives that pandemic enforced on all of us.
Images of traffic jams in hilly regions of Himachal Pradesh or at water falls in Karnataka or Tamil Nadu, only highlight an apparent and innate stupidity that no vaccine or Government policy can check. What one wonders is the absolute lack of a sense of self preservation displayed by the masses of the so-called educated gentry from cities and towns, whose antics are spreading despair and distress among the health workers community.
It seems as if the vacationing masses have totally forgotten the contribution of doctors and medical nurses in big and small hospitals in fighting the pandemic. And all this display of collective idiotic behaviour comes at a time when the world is readying for a near certain third wave. Global health experts are warning that the third wave, now in the making, could unleash more variants and mutants of the Coronavirus.
Agreed that movement of people is a must for revival of economic activity, badly hit by the pandemic, and tourism and transport generate livelihood for countless people. But, are we doing it the right way, is the question that begs to be answered.
It seems as if Covid has vanished and that all the people crowding public places have got vaccinated. But it seems they do not realise that even vaccination is no guarantee against Covid infection, and there have been cases reported from across India of fully vaccinated persons also contracting the virus.
True, the fully vaccinated people are much safer but their affliction surely would put more pressure on the already beleaguered and overstretched health care sector. What can any Government do if people just simply won’t follow Covid appropriate norms like masking up and maintaining social distancing–the two key elements in the fight against the virus?
This, however, is not to ignore the shortcomings in Government policies, and or their implementation. No less than the Supreme Court had questioned the Central Government’s vaccination policy, which led to course correction.
Though instances of shortages of vaccines are being reported from here and there, there are some visible efforts to shore up the vaccination drive. But the task up ahead is gigantic–vaccinating the entire Indian population, and clearly it will take time. As per Government figures, so far 30 percent of the country’s population is vaccinated with at least one dose, but the number of people given the mandatory two doses is still a cause for concern.
Which is why, it becomes imperative for the common man as an entity to follow the Covid appropriate norms even if only for self-preservation.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated that we are already at the beginning of the third wave, expected to be less severe (fortunately) than the second wave that was disastrous for India in terms of its intensity, rapidness of spread and its impact on a health sector that crumbled under the extreme pressure on its physical and human resources.
Indian health administrators predict the third wave to hit the country by the end of the next month of August, and the good news is that it is likely to be less severe in its impact as compared to the devastating second wave.
What the second wave did was to shock the Nation into doing the right things, and it is reasonable to expect the Central and State Governments to do what is right, and in time. Which is why, State after State is readying for the possible third wave by shoring up capacities of hospitals, erecting oxygen plants and strengthening drug supply chains.
But what can weaken India’s collective fight against the pandemic is the way in which the people respond to easing lockdown restrictions as is visible from a host of pictures and videos from across the country. If this mindset and behaviour continues, we are condemned to another wave of deaths and destruction (of the economy).
Health experts would advocate the lockdowns and restrictions as they seem to work in containing the spread of the virus. But livelihood is a bigger concern and hence graded easing of restrictions is the correct approach that the country is following. At the risk of repeating myself, I must add here that what we do in between the two waves is very important, and if we do the right things, it is possible to keep the mortalities to the minimum, if and when the third wave hits us. It is more or less clear that the third wave will hit, it is not an if, but a question of when.
Forewarned, and with the lessons we learnt in the second wave, we must drive away the over-positive way of thinking and stay rooted to the reality–that the Coronavirus is here to stay, for a long time and that it is the new normal. We have to build our lives around it, skirt it to the maximum extent possible, and there is no other way.
Now, the happy news for India is that the second wave appears to have ebbed and the number of cases has come down all across India, barring a few regions in the South, West and the North East. But, it is not the time for complacency, but one that must be used to prepare properly for the third wave. We need to be cautious in not going back to ‘normal’ till actually the global public health experts declare so. It is during this ebbing period that we need to be doubly cautious and alert–we must be extra vigilant, step up surveillance by maintaining aggressive testing, especially in symptomatic individuals, and keep a close watch on the seven-day moving average of the test positivity rate (TPR). A TPR of less than 5% indicates that the disease is under control. We also need to carry out genomic sequencing to keep a watch on the emergence of new variants of Coronavirus. The task up ahead is huge–and we need to forget politics, keep it aside and stay focused on fighting the pandemic.
Lakshmana Venkat Kuchi is a senior journalist tracking social, economic, and political changes across the country. He was associated with the Press Trust of India, The Hindu, Sunday Observer, and Hindustan Times. He can be reached on
[email protected] and Twitter handle @kvlakshman