India’s nightmare puts ours into context
MY plan for this column was going to be something quite trivial, until I saw the TV news on Sunday night, and the awful events unfolding in India.
Bodies being unceremoniously burnt on pyres, queues of people waiting for oxygen tanks to be filled as their relatives had all but given up on hospitals being able to treat their loved ones, and unimaginable numbers of cases and deaths.
The scenes in many of India’s largest cities are the nightmare scenario that we were threatened with, but turned into reality, and with little end in sight.
The fear is that the world’s worst outbreak of Covid has yet to reach its terrifying peak – with more than a million new coronavirus cases being identified in India every three days.
There are a variety of factors behind these desperate scenes, from the political failings of the Indian government and its decrepit healthcare, to the country’s huge issues of overcrowding which make social distancing all but impossible.
Another factor, a potent new strain of the virus which includes a possible ‘double mutation’, means it risks not just lives on the South Asian subcontinent, but everywhere.
The late stopping of flights between India and the UK – arrivals were only turned away last Friday – is a mistake that our own authorities have to answer, and may yet come back to haunt us in the future.
But, for now, the issue is whether enough international support can be gleaned to help India through this entire nightmare scenario.
It also puts into perspective our own sacrifices, and makes this year’s lengthy lockdown seem more and more sensible.
I would dare anyone who wants to question the veracity of the virus, or the measures which have been taken to contain it, to look at the events in India and still insist it is all some kind of global conspiracy.
Yet some people continue to give credence to such nonsense.
One pub landlord in Bath even went as far as throwing Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer out of the establishment which he co-runs, as he claimed the lockdown was merely because ‘old people are dying’ – and that they would have died anyway.
More worrying was the fact that daytime TV hosts decided to get this man – Rod Humphris – on to their show to argue his case.
It came down to Dr Hilary Jones to tell him that he should stick to pulling pints, instead of engaging in halfbaked political commentary, in the end, thank goodness.
I can understand frustration with what we have all been through, but it has been a vital necessity.
We have, to put it mildly, become fed up with lockdown, and the slow but definite sense we are coming out of it has been as much of a boost to our mutual morale as the sunny spell of weather we have been having.
But despite the devastation it has caused, the livelihoods destroyed and the mental health crisis which is inevitably coming our way next, few can now say that lockdown has not done its job.
Though our country would be far more capable of coping better with the ‘worst case’ scenario which is engulfing India and may still be seen elsewhere, we would have still faced hospitals overflowing with patients and overwhelmed, and thousands more deaths.
The jobs lost, the businesses which have been ruined and the sense of isolation that so many of us have felt – they have not been for nothing.
Those sacrifices have helped us avoid the scenes which we are now seeing across India, from Mumbai to Delhi and in many more places.
How many lives it has saved cannot be known. But I, for one, am glad that they have been saved.
Our sacrifices have helped us to avoid the scenes we are now seeing across India