The Price Of Lowering Our Guard

Why this Covid catastrophe is upon us, and what we need to do now

- Zarir F Udwadia

How did it all fall apart so spectacularly? Just a few months ago, our health minister sanguinely led us to believe we had overcome Covid-19, triumphantly declaring that “India has flattened the Covid graph.” Three months later those words ring hollow as India is at crisis point, its health infrastructure deficiencies ruthlessly exposed.

Hospital beds are impossible to come by even for the rich and powerful who find to their horror that wealth and status pose no obstacle to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Oxygen shortages and rationing, overflowing graveyards and crematoriums are not just nightmare scenarios from a dystopian future but very real, even in the country’s financial nerve centre, Mumbai. Essential drugs (and some deemed “essential”), like remdesivir and tocilizumab are impossible to get even at black market rates, and the number of cases across the country reached a tragic global milestone with 3,12,731 new infections recorded in a single day (1 in every 7 globally) taking India’s tally to 15 million cases with a death toll of 1,80,000.

What are the reasons for this disaster? Here are the four that I believe are most relevant.

1. Complacency: Indians let down their collective guard. Instead of being bombarded with messages exhorting us to be vigilant, we heard self-congratulatory declarations of victory from our leaders, now cruelly exposed as mere self-assured hubris. Let’s be honest, we seemed to be doing well at the start of the year not because of any great public health strategy but merely due to “luck” and the virus biding its time. And then the bad just got worse.