I didn’t tell you so...but you ought to have known

 

I wrote about the Corona pandemic in in April 2020 and tried to decode the statistics.

http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-and-labyrinth-of-statistics.html

I was way off the mark, I have some mud on my face certainly, but then I wrote as a rookie whereas nearly all the experts have mud on their faces too and a copious helping at that. Be that as it may, as the French would say, les carottes sont cuites, or those carrots are cooked, so be it.

Worse than that, I followed up with a rather smug programme on YouTube channel, thepublic.india in early March of this year: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5rjvGJmMQs 

The underlying theme in the programme was that India had done well, or at least much better than other big countries, and if it did generate some feel good about our country, there was no need to be sheepish about it. I did add that it was not the time to drop our guard; we had to make sure that this second wave was also subdued quickly. 

We are now in the middle of nothing less than a colossal disaster. People are dying, in hospitals because of lack of medicines and Oxygen,  in ambulances because hospitals have no beds to accept them, in homes waiting for their waiting list for hospitalization to mature. And we have our governments, mainly the Central government but various state governments, looking perplexed, seeming to show that it was as broad as it was long so any port in this storm was fine. Or worse, conveying an impression, through actions and inactions, that it was not the time to blink and set the alarm bells ringing. 

Adding fuel to the flames are a whole lot of people, politicians, self-styled experts and backseat drivers of multiple hues, saying that they did tell so. Did they? Go through what they indeed said and all you will find are clichés and bombastic inanities, far removed from reality and practicability. Ignore that as it does not matter. 

The situation seems to be getting out of hand. This makes me sad and angry about the response of the government. Yes, I did not tell you. Yes, not many did. Confound the hotshot who did not but shamelessly tell us that they did! My point is that who am I, or who are they, to tell you anything? You are the government, you have the machinery, you have the mandate and you must know. You must know, perceive, discern, learn and act. You did not. 

I am not even sure that you have seen it yet. Or if you have grasped it, you are still blowing hot and cold. I will only give you some examples: 

You are announcing addition of hospital beds for the last 3 weeks or so. Had you heeded the warnings prior to the peak of the first wave, howsoever inaccurate, you would have done something in the last one year and at least tripled the number of hospital beds in the country. You could have built one mega Covid hospital in every major city. You did not. 

Let alone proper HDU and ICU facilities, even temporary Covid hospitals are too few. And yet you (and unfortunately the media) trumpeting about conversion of second-class railway coaches into isolation wards. A hair-brained idea if there ever was one, as a railway coach, which  in our summer heats up like an oven, is the last place to keep patients. Every city has a huge reservoir of vacant rooms in large clusters like hostels, rest houses, hotels, even dharmshalas which have remained vacant since March of last year; they are easily amenable for conversion as isolation wards or even hospitals. My guesstimate: we can easily locate more than a lakh such rooms in the country, far more than these wretched coaches. 

Making Medical Oxygen is not rocket science. It can be done in very small plants too. The problem is mainly in logistics like lack of storage, means of transportation and cylinders. It was logical, therefore, that existing small plants of Industrial Oxygen as well new ones be mobilized to produce Medical Oxygen thereby making large cities and their hospitals self-reliant. In the backdrop of deaths due to non-availability of such Oxygen, why do state governments have to petition the centre for supplies? Could they not have planned for self-sufficiency? Is it not ridiculous that you have to engage DRDO to set up Medical Oxygen plants now, shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted and shutting it now with golden locks? And in the middle of all this transportation of Oxygen in tankers on RO-RO trains is being pitched as great news, once again by some insipid reporting. 

Lack of medicines in the country which you liked to project as the factory of the world for pharmaceuticals? Did you engage with the myriad Pharma companies in our country to make sure that there was abundance, not merely adequacy, of Covid medicines? Were you busy only fashioning yourself as the vishwaguru (teacher of the world), simply piggybacking on the efforts of decades by these Pharma companies? Need I say more? 

And vaccines? From a celebrated exporter to an importer now? It now appears that India had these two vaccines mainly due to far-sighted, but risk-prone, actions by some manufacturers. What support have you actually provided to these manufacturers other than praising them on TV interviews and panel discussions? 

The process of vaccination is not organized well. While the actual vaccination is a matter of 30 seconds, the administrative work of registration is handled poorly, with support staff struggling on their mobile phones and making the recipients fill up forms which could easily be computer-generated pre-filled ones. The speed of vaccination can perhaps not be improved much today for want of vaccines but have we woken up to streamline the process to achieve more than 50 lakh vaccinations per day when the availability is not an issue? 

I have talked only about the treatment-related issues. Are preventive measures taken with any sincerity? Or is it something you can easily blame it on irresponsible and Covid-inappropriate behaviour of public at large? 

Do wake up, Government! It’s close to now or never.