JOIN USCovid-19 deaths: Landscape of hell
At the time of writing this, some 3,000-4,000 people are dying a day of a deadly virus, taking the total death toll since the beginning of the pandemic close to 240,000, and a total caseload to nearly 22 million. Experts believe that the figures are grossly underestimated. There is widespread murmur that our governments try to cover up uncharitable data, unsavoury to their image, even if by force and intimidation. As the pandemic rages on, we now know that summer months cannot stop its onward match, that people without any comorbidities may die as well, there is no age bar on who might get infected as younger people are also dying. And there are the images of makeshift crematoria, people gasping to death outside hospitals without oxygen. Alongside nursing a fear of death, there is the added fear of dying without having one’s family by one’s side. Images of bodies washing up along the shores of the shores of the Ganga and the Yamuna in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh evoke a complete landscape of hell.
Somehow, the civil society, volunteers and social media are proving to be of greater help than our governments. And our Prime Minister, who loves to emblazon his photo on any central project and take credit, is nowhere in public view. If Indians are already familiar with living precariously, the pandemic has presented them with the prospect of dying without even the minimum semblance of medical attention as a helpless government, known for its monumental apathy, conceit and bigotry, is behaving like a deer caught in the headlights. One suspects that in its zeal for electoral aggrandisement, in seeking to capture states that had gone to polls, it overruled its chances to be overrun by the pandemic. And for the thousands of people who are dying, accounted or without being accounted for, we have no means to know how many died without a hospital bed, how many asphyxiated to death without oxygen, how many died due to lockdown due to ill-health or starvation, how many ended lives in desperation, and therefore, how many lives could have been saved with the right medical intervention at the right time.
The problem of cold statistics is also that it leaves out the fundamental details, the atmospherics and circumstances. Thus, when we heard that over a hundred people died because of demonetisation in 2016, the number was hardly a measure of the enormity of the nationwide disruption that the exercise caused. The government refused to mourn the deaths due to hardships caused by demonetisation either because it refused to link the deaths to the exercise or because it counted the deaths as fair price for restructuring the country, much the same way as Stalin or Mao did.
There seems to be no cumulative fair record of the CAA (and NRC) protest-related deaths in 2020, either. Consequent to the violence that erupted over CAA in Northeast Delhi, some 53 persons were killed, but that gives us no clue to the actual mayhem and horror on the ground.
And when the pandemic swept across the nation and a draconian lockdown was imposed, the Ministry of Labour and Employment could not provide any data of migrant workers who lost their jobs and their lives during the Covid-19 lockdown. But the pictures of thousands of such workers trudging along hundreds of miles of highways and some dying in road and rail accidents will continue to haunt us much the same way the images of overcrowded crematoriums do now to our collective memory.
The leading medical journal Lancet draws upon an apocalyptic estimate by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of a staggering one million deaths from Covid-19 by August 1, warning that in the event of such an extremely grim outcome, the Modi government would be “responsible for presiding over a self-inflicted national catastrophe.” Gabriel Leung, a leading public health epidemiologist from Hong Kong, warned that the pandemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population if left unchecked. “People needed to have faith and trust in their government while the uncertainties of the new outbreak were worked out by the scientific community,” he said, “and of course, when you have social media and fake news and real news all mixed in there and then zero trust, how do you fight that epidemic?” But when the government is itself responsible for frittering away popular goodwill and trust by indulging in fake news and spin and resorting to subterfuges by suppressing or fudging facts, how can it expect the citizens to trust it?
If history is any guide, the refusal of the Eisenhower administration, more devoted to private solutions, to mount a vaccination programme to deal with the Asian flu pandemic of 1957 had disastrous consequences. President Woodrow Wilson’s militant passivity to the 1918 influenza pandemic resulted in an even greater spread of the contagion. The pandemic that happened a century ago also spanned over two years, with two-thirds of the deaths occurring in a period of 24 weeks, killing more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century. But, if the ravages of the 1918 influenza pandemic left a trail of wholesale death and desolation, the abiding message was also of a valiant resistance put up by science and discovery and by firm, determined action.
The Lancet has duly warned that for India’s fight against the pandemic to be successful, the government must own up to its mistakes, provide responsible leadership and transparency, and implement a public health response that has “science at its heart.” If Modi still nurses some pretensions to a grand image, it is now his call to stop this danse macabre. Changing the narrative is sure to be counter-productive, as the pandemic cannot be stopped with fudged facts and spin. Building trust is more important than building the Central Vista.