Covid-19: A battle for our very survival
As the nation is locked down, and the keys are handed over to Mother Nature — only to be taken back when she clears the impending doom — we must realise that the situation will only get difficult as days pass. Maybe not worse, but difficult for sure. As the number of case would invariably rise, the quarantine would need to be stricter, and the lockdown longer. The treatment of the cases with symptoms requiring advanced healthcare would be a very difficult task, given the available health care preparedness which is overtly insufficient even for “a small endemic outbreak” as was witnessed on many occasions in the not very distant past — such as the infant deaths during Japanese encephalitis outbreak in 2018-19. Thus, the lockdown, and the expected “every-citizen isolation” is our best shot at surviving this unprecedented global situation. For a country of 1,380 million people, out of which an estimated 300 million people live below the poverty line on a hand-to-mouth daily wa...