Covid-19: The nation is at war
A human tragedy of an unprecedented scale is unfolding. The State needs to act immediately
One of India’s most respected army chiefs, who led the country to victory in Kargil, General Ved Malik, tweeted on Sunday morning, “Our nation is at war.” On Saturday, more than twice the number of Indians died due to Covid-19 than were killed in action in Kargil. As General Malik said, “Is the nation focused on this war? Election rallies, faith events, farmer agitation, in-fighting over resources going on...wake up India.” The appeal comes in the wake of India confronting an unprecedented second wave of Covid-19 infections — hitting a record number of cases and deaths every day, even as there is an acute shortage of everything from hospital beds to oxygen to medicines to vaccines.
Covid-19 has come home to India’s urban centres, to middle class homes, to the elite, to the working class, in ways that diminish what happened last year when the pandemic first struck. There’s a waiting list everywhere and for everything — for tests, admission to hospitals, even at crematoriums and graveyards (with onground reports suggesting a disjunction between official fatality figures and these). And there is a shortage of everything — oxygen, ICU beds, and remdesivir. And everywhere and for everything, getting care has become dependent on who you know, as public health systems collapse, automatically excluding the majority.
It did not have to be this way. The government may have made an error of judgment in not anticipating the intensity of the second wave, though there were adequate warnings. But, the current situation does highlight a clear policy failure on varied counts — from not using the past year to boost India’s health infrastructure enough to deal with current numbers to slipping into business-as-usual mode when it came to events (including large elections), from a painfully slow rollout of the vaccination (only absolute numbers as a proportion of the population, not relative to the rest of the world, matter here) to the delay in imposing curbs. What’s important now is to fix the crisis, and be prepared in case there is another wave after this one (remember the United State’s third wave was its worst, although it came before the vaccine drive began). This requires the State to pump all its resources into beat the second wave. It is war, and nothing short of a war effort is needed.