Editor's Letter: A State Of Despair
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway
With over 3,000,000 deaths worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to cause massive disruption and despair. The United States, Brazil and India are the top three countries majorly impacted by the coronavirus. Here at home in India, we are in the midst of a severe outbreak of the disease and are being told to brace up for a third wave. All of India has been asking – how did we let it get to this stage? We had a whole year to prepare for this eventuality and still landed in the situation we are in today.
What rankles is that we were congratulating ourselves on our preparedness after the first wave earlier in the year. Instead of starting the vaccination drive for our younger population we were celebrating and donating vaccines. Yes, we did manage to stem the rise of the pandemic and the cases did come down, but that was the time for reflection, for research, and also to prepare for the next wave. The scientific community had warned of this deadly mutation, but we ignored all warnings and went ahead with social gatherings, political rallies and also religious congregations.
What stands out is the fact that out healthcare infrastructure has been brought to its knees. We were always a country with low spends on healthcare (less than two per cent of the GDP) but the inadequacies have starkly come to light during this crisis. Patients were scrambling for oxygen cylinders, hospital beds and medication to treat this deadly disease. As the nightmare began to unfold another truth came out – the lack of trained medical staff to deal with the pandemic. Our medics are over worked and exhausted – many have come out to narrate heart- breaking stories of their fight against Covid and of trying to save patients and failing.
Even as the world steps up to help us, by providing aid (ventilators, oxygen cylinders, vaccines and medicines), scenes from across the country are of heartbreak and despair. A question being asked time and again is – why are we not going in for a national lockdown? Yes, the last time the nation had to contend with a major economic dent because of the lockdown, but isn’t saving lives a priority at the moment? It would be prudent to bring into effect a national lockdown in the short term, to break the chain of the virus.
In this issue, we take stock of how we are dealing with the virus, the challenges in management, the impact it will have on the economy and an overall perspective of the situation. We have captured voices of leaders from across sectors on all these aspects. In addition, we have our regular columns and features you look forward to.
We pray for India to heal and for the world to heal.
