It was the first of February, pleasant winter morning when I received the call in India where I was travelling.
“He was coughing for a few days, then he had a fever,” said Bill’s secretary. “The next day we moved him to a hospital because he developed a breathing problem. He was about the same for two days. Yesterday, I got a frantic call, asking me to come immediately. When I arrived two doctors were trying to revive him. But he was gone. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. It is that strange disease.” It was Covid-19.
It was my first encounter with the pandemic. I had lost my first friend.
That was two years ago. I returned from India, and I never travelled again. Flights were cancelled, and airports closed. I could drive and go somewhere, but where would I stay? You could not intrude on anyone’s hospitality and hotels were a serious risk. For two years, I remained in my home, essentially immobile. Rather a strange story.
What is stranger is that it is not a strange story at all, for everybody has been living the same story. Nobody can make a move. Practically every country has been shutting its doors, discouraging visitors from other states. Some airlines closed their shutters; others reduced flights or imposed harsh restrictions. If you wriggle through and arrive in another country, you run a gauntlet of tests and end up quarantined for weeks. Others I know have been in the same position as me, pinioned to their home.
For months, I have been hearing the same plaintive message from friends and neighbours, “I am going crazy!” They feel the restrictions have been robbing them of their life and the successive months have been of utter deprivation and misery. I understand some of their frustration, for I chafe too at some of the limitations. Yet I have difficulty evincing great sympathy with their predicament. These are not day labourers or restaurant workers whose livelihood is threatened by social distancing; these are people who work comfortably from home or belong to the rentier class who live on their secure income.
The first thing to remember is that this is not the first pandemic in history. There weren’t so many airlines and international passengers but there was always a vast legion of travellers crossing borders, for business or pleasure, in boats and trains, carts and camels. Germs and viruses did not stay put but travelled with people, from one country to another, one continent to the next.
In the last century alone, we had four major pandemics that killed at least a million people: the cholera epidemic that started in India and went to Africa, Europe and the Middle East; the flu epidemic a decade later that spanned the globe; the Asian flu, starting in China, spread to Hong Kong and Singapore and reached the US; and another flu epidemic that began in Hong Kong and quickly jumped to Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Australia, Europe and the US. This does not include the AIDS epidemic that began in 1976 and killed 30 million and would have killed another 30 million who survived thanks to new science. The second epidemic killed 50 million, twenty-five times the number felled by Covid-19 so far.
The lesson is that we have a far milder massacre this time, especially if you think of the 200 million that perished in Asia, Europe and Africa of bubonic plague in the 14th century, dying excruciating deaths of painful boils, fever, insomnia, nausea and sheer delirium. We need to retain some perspective and realize that we will certainly have more pandemics, as human settlements increasingly invade animal habitats. Doubtless, we will once again be helpless and scramble for protection against an unknown assassin.
I am shocked that in our preoccupation with personal concerns and private fears, we overlook the most stunning aspect of the present pandemic. This pandemic is an international blight, striking every country including the most isolated island and archipelago, and yet the response is pathetically limited and insular. At the level of doctors and nurses, there was some minimal sharing of information, but there was virtually none of the swift and full sharing of experiences that could have saved many more lives.
There were at least thirty separate initiatives for developing a vaccine in as many countries, involving talented groups of researchers, but scant cooperation could have eliminated false leads quickened promising approaches and saved precious time. Companies in different lands competed fiercely to develop a marketable product fast, for a sizable profit bonanza but never considered joining hands to help dying men and women.
The World Health Organization, for which it could have been a showcase of its international role, seemed consistently in a subsidiary role of gathering secondary data and disseminating basic safety guidelines. The US, which has sometimes played the lead in bringing countries together in such crises, pursued the perverse, self-defeating goal of America First. Its foolhardy leader, Trump, minimized the threat and abdicated its international responsibility and failed even to develop a sane national strategy. In short, it was a world debacle of the first order. Six million, and their hapless families, have already paid the price for that catastrophe.
When I hear of the individual frustrations, I begin to realize, despite the vast opportunities today for international communication and awareness, how utterly provincial we have remained, how little we can transcend our pettiest concerns and how scantly we have learned to get together as a race to wage a clearly-needed international crusade.
(The writer is a US-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at mnandy@gmail.com)