The coronavirus pandemic has turned our life upside down. Harried citizens living in noisy metropolises wanted some moments of peace, but now after three weeks of enforced lockdown, they want to return to their old rushed schedule. The sahib logs are missing their golf while true blue memsahibs have been reduced to being house helps.

The lockdown has been catastrophic for professionals, daily-wage earners and small businessmen, whose present earnings have disappeared and who apprehend an uncertain future. However, scratch the surface and you find that not much has changed for politicians. President Trump is busy cursing the Chinese, now, for bringing the “Wuhan virus” to the US. Some of his vengeful ire for multilateral agencies is now focused at WHO for “toeing the Chinese line” and “endangering American lives.”

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In the meantime, Trump has found time to threaten India into sending the drug, hydroxychloroquine, to the US. Regardless of the fact that US had the highest number of casualties and the highest number of coronavirus deaths, Trump now claims that coronavirus is a waning force in the US. Similar exaggerated claims are being made by most European leaders, without any evidence of the coronavirus having gone into remission.

Despite the fact that we had a spate of pandemics like SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), H1N1 (Swine Flu), Bird Flu, MERS (Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome), Ebola, Zika and Nipah in the last few years, no country in the world, except Germany, had even a semblance of a plan to fight a virus outbreak. The bluster of world leaders appears to be designed to cover up their own failures in facing the coronavirus pandemic.

Coming from the outrageous to the ludicrous, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has blamed djinns and the US for spread of the coronavirus in Iran. While opposing the ban on religious congregations, clerics in Pakistan, declared that coronavirus could not harm the faithful. The internet is teeming with myriad miracle recipes for preventing/combating Covid-19 and ultra-swadeshi types were initially touting cow urine as a sure-shot remedy for coronavirus.

Closer home, the Central Government is complimenting itself on having almost contained the pandemic in India; indeed, the Health ministry has released figures of number of infections prevented, much on the lines of the calculation of “presumptive loss” on sale of airwaves, made by an earlier CAG. State Governments are not far behind, claiming success in the face of rapidly rising infection figures.

We get a sense of déjà vu as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads. The neighbourhood grocer and vegetable vendor have increased their prices, probably due to the increased cost of logistics. The price of the yet untried remedy, hydroxychloroquine, has increased ten-fold. China is busy exporting PPEs and masks to India, to tackle a pandemic exported by itself. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day, alleging that the coronavirus was developed by China and knowingly released in other countries so that the economies of those countries would fail and China could buy up their assets cheaply.

The apocalypse predictors are not far behind; according to their calculations 40 crore people in India will be infected by coronavirus, out of which 4 crores would be severe cases. Never mind the fact that we have approximately 14,000 cases of coronavirus infections today and at the current growth rate it would take considerable time to reach the mythical figure of 40 crores, by which time a cure would be available.

Big industrialists are out in full force, lining up for incentives, after making donations to the PM Cares Fund. Not many people are espousing the cause of migrant labour and daily wagers, who have to remain satisfied with intermittent meals and whatever shelter they get. The pink papers, with their penchant for looking at social and health issues in purely monetary terms, have also waded into the controversy, one going so far as to claim that if India had a million ICU beds and a million ventilators then it could have avoided the lockdown.

Such an assertion runs counter to the experience of the Western world vis-à-vis the current Covid-19 pandemic. The USA, Italy, Spain and England have the required wherewithal but are still debilitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, all these countries enforced their version of the lockout but were still unable to prevent the spread of Covid-19, which rages on undeterred, taking a fearful toll of human lives. The Covid-19 death rate in India is 3.33 per cent, roughly half of that of the Western countries which would indicate that advanced healthcare is futile once the virus takes root.

It can be safely said that if we had a sufficient supply of ordinary health equipment like PPE kits, masks etc then the number of infected people also would have been lower, resulting in correspondingly fewer deaths. It would appear that the correct way to handle future pandemics in India would be to augment basic health services and spread information about healthy practices, which the entire population should adopt. So far as the SARS-nCoV2 virus is concerned, the relative immunity of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to the virus, would be a topic of research for epidemiologists.

This immunity may be due to the BCG vaccination given to all of us in our childhood, our built-in immunity which we all have by our exposure to poor sanitation and health services, or the fact that the virus cannot flourish in a hot climate. Contrasting the course of Covid-19 through a state like Kerala and states like UP and MP, one may conclude that leadership and motivation of health workers is crucial to the control of the pandemic.

In MP, the Health Secretary hid her contact with an infected person (her son who had returned from abroad) and ended up infecting her entire staff and some doctors. UP treated SARS-nCoV2 infected patients as criminals, adopting strong-arm methods against them and their relatives which made them hide and infect more people. In contrast, Kerala treated Covid-19 patients as victims of the virus, motivating them to disclose their infection and prevent further spread. Of course, it is no one’s case that our health infrastructure is perfect.

Budget 2019 made a measly allocation Rs 93,035 crore on healthcare out of which only Rs 71,584 crore could be spent, which is less than ½ per cent of our GDP, far below the optimum level of 6 per cent of GDP. Even the flagship Ayushman Bharat Scheme suffered from neglect; as against a budgeted amount of Rs 6,400 crore, only Rs 3,200 crore were spent, which comes to a mere Rs 64 per beneficiary. The Government has made a welcome commitment to raise public healthcare spending to 2.5 per cent of the GDP by 2025, but much more expeditious action is required.

Natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis and pandemics, now recur with alarming frequency because humankind has become too arrogant; we try to subjugate nature in the mistaken belief that we have a licence to do whatever we want for our pleasure. The polar ice-caps are melting, perennial rivers are drying up, forest fires rage unabated for months but we do nothing to curb our polluting industries.

United Nations Climate Change Conferences are held annually since 1995, but the most important participants, US and China, wriggle out of making any concrete commitments. Climate change warnings are regularly junked and climate change activists are often derided; after Greta Thunberg won the Time’s Person of the Year Award, President Trump mockingly tweeted “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”

Recurring pandemics, including Covid-19, are the result of animal-origin pathogens invading the human immune system ~ a direct consequence of deforestation where man has intruded on the space meant for animals. The physicist Stephen Hawking summed it up very succinctly: “One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development.

The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn’t any more available.”

(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax)