It’s 5 days on since the strict lockdown and the jury is still out whether it’s having an impact or not. It’s true that this lockdown is stricter than the ones before but one is not sure if that is enough. More people have been arrested and fined its true but the lockdown breakers are many. More worrying is that most of those arrested are the poor who have no option other than to go out. Many can’t afford to observe lock downs even if they wanted to. They are simply too stressed economically to abide by rules of safety.
At the same time, they are also spreaders. That means being out is unsafe for all. Seventy percent of slum dwellers are seropositive which shows how vulnerable they are and how difficult it is to control the pandemic when such a large population is spreading. The fact that they didn’t fall sick or die was largely because the virus at that stage was relatively mutation free. The current version –Delta – is not as kind. So the present is a threat to all.
The response of the government has been from the beginning a bit confusing and unsure. They have not been able to detect the health system weaknesses and nor act as robustly as was needed. Thus in serial, many errors were noted. This began with the lack of preparedness in every aspect. To be fair, most countries were caught napping but they have developed their systems too. Unfortunately, this has not happened in our and few other cases.
The other problem is our dismal private sector, who are the biggest beneficiary of the pandemic. They have not become identified with extreme corruption and poor services but have exposed the sleazy side of the health sector. The Government’s regulatory system is unable to cope with them partly because the very regulators are in league with the corrupt private sector.
Corruption is not the issue here. The issue is coping with corona. Till date, the nature of the virus has been the main help in keeping it under control and death and infections rates have both been on the lower side. Now that isn’t possible with the Delta variant as the world has come to learn. Vaccination is the only answer.
Apart from over dependence on India and failure to build vaccine bridges with China, the internal management has not been great on vaccines. There was no contingency plan and no long term thinking leading to a crisis where millions of doses are needed. The PM has assured us that vaccines will be available by December. If that happens, it’s great.
We don’t want to contemplate a future where the vaccine deal doesn’t work out but how does one survive till December is the key? The lockdown one presumes is part of that strategy. But is it working? The current daily infection and death rates are products of the pre-lockdown situation so we will take at least another week before we know if such strategies are working or not.
Bangladesh has a health and economic crisis affecting particularly the poor. Given its past record in the recent 18 months, one does have to wonder what miracle it needs to pull off to make their plans work.
