TRICK AND TREAT

THE WEEK tracks how India’s innate resourcefulness and an unprecedented administrative mobilisation are helping the country prepare for an all-out war against Covid-19

- NAMITA KOHLI

Dr Tushar Waykhinde has been living on the G.T. Hospital campus in Mumbai ever since the housing colony in Bhayandar, where he has a flat, asked him to stay out. “They have banned me from my home,” said Waykhinde. His relatives back home are urging him to quit his job and come home; they fear for his safety, as there are not enough gloves, masks and coveralls in the hospital.

Waykhinde is not listening, though. If he does, India will have one trooper less in its thin force of warriors combating a virus that has already killed more than 40,000 people worldwide. The virus is yet to crush India, which has put up its defences with a three-week lockdown to break the transmission chain. Yet, as Dr Tarun Bhatnagar, epidemiologist at the ICMR-National Institute of Virology, Chennai, and member of the national task force against Covid-19, warns, “an epidemic is inevitable. By itself, the lockdown will not help. We are only buying time to prepare the health infrastructure.”

As the infrastructure is being fortified, India’s health managers under Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan are also discovering chinks in their armour. The most glaring is the shortage of doctors and nurses. The World Health Organization prescribes one doctor and three nurses for every 1,000 citizens, but with just 1.16 million allopaths and 3.07 million nurses, India has only one doctor for every 1,445 citizens, and less than two nurses for every thousand.

The shortage may not be crippling in normal times. But, faced with a pandemic that has clobbered western Europe and America, India’s health managers are looking at a nightmarish prospect. With no evidence of community outbreak yet, “we are seeing five times more patients than in normal times”, said Dr Amol Annadate, paediatrician and public health expert in Maharashtra.