Can you write an essay on how India is dealiig with covid.
Answers
India, which has the second-largest population in the world is suffering severely from COVID-19 disease. By May 18th, India investigated ∼1 lakh (0.1million) infected cases from COVID-19, and as of 11th July the cases equalled 8 lakhs. Social distancing and lockdown rules were employed in India, which however had an additional impact on the economy, human living, and environment. Where a negative impact was observed for the economy and human life, the environment got a positive one.
How corona virus spread to India
In the beginning, coronavirus cases in India happened due to the abroad connection rather than transmission within the country. The first three infection cases occurred on 30th January and 3rd February in Kerala as they returned from Wuhan China . Within a month later on 3rd March, two more cases were reported where one patient had a travel history from Italy while the other in Hyderabad visited Dubai. On the very same day, few other cases were observed in Jaipur .
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Explanation:
The lockdown in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic will have terrible consequences on an informal economy that relies first and foremost on movements and will deepen the socioeconomic inequalities that divide the country. The risk of people dying from hunger is extremely high and the death toll worsened by poor health infrastructures.
In December, while Wuhan province was witnessing the beginning of the actual Covid-19 pandemic, India was facing massive and violent uprisings. Hundreds of thousands of Indians protested all over the country against the discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law that had just been passed by its parliament—the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)—and as a backlash violent attacks occurred on universities and Muslim working-class neighbourhoods by armed vigilantes. All this while the authorities were negating the presence of community transmission of the virus despite the first cases appearing way back in January to finally declare a 21-day lockdown on the midnight of 24 March, with only a 4 hour notice. This announcement, as in France, has triggered migration from the cities to the countryside, but of a completely different nature: in India, the internal migrant workers, day labourers and the poor—deprived of resources—have decided to return to their native villages. This tragic and deadly exodus of migrants fleeing cities is the most visible stigmata of the profound health, economic and social crisis that this threefold essay offers to analyse.
Accessing Healthcare under the Lockdown
This pandemic has brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of some of the best health systems. For the Indian health system, one of the most burdened and least funded in the world, this could be a critical moment; as government facilities are already overstretched in a highly fractured, underfunded and geographically uneven health system (Das 2015; Drèze & Sen 2013; Hodges & Rao 2016). This invites us to examine the way the current crisis risks to enhance long lasting health inequalities and how dysfunctional health infrastructures may collapse under the strain of the coming dramatic spike in Covid-19 cases in India.
At the beginning of its national lockdown, India simply did not have enough testing kits and even if the government has given licenses to private companies to sell them in India, the constraint on testing lies in the number of laboratories. On 23rd of March, India had 118 accredited labs for a population of 1.3 billion with huge geographical inequalities; Arunachal Pradesh (1,5 million) and Nagaland (3,3 million) had no testing centres, Bihar had only one accredited lab for a population of 110 million compared to 8 facilities in Rajasthan for a population of 80 million. Even if states were supplied with an infinite number of testing kits, government labs would not be able to utilise them, as their testing capacity is around 90 samples per day. That’s why the government had allowed private players to conduct Covid-19 tests, which means that even those who are not hospitalised can get tested but at their own cost. The price cap of 4500 INR (around 55 euros) per test by the government, is too high for most Indians. With stigma associated with the virus and the actual lockdown some accredited private labs have already declared that the task was just impossible. Considering the high price of private testing and all the logistical problems associated with the lockdown, most Indians are likely to depend only on the public system to get tested. In an already stretched and underfunded public healthcare system, money spent on the coronavirus tests leaves less for other public health problems as India spends only 3.7 percent of its total budget on health. A budget that is far too limited to respond to the massive need of intensive care that has been necessary in countries already impacted by Covid-19.
Conclusion
In such a historical moment, one would expect to place national unity above all and to relegate stigmatization as well as religious/ethnic/caste/class-based polarization to the backstage. But nothing is less certain. As migrants go home, they face attacks and are ostracized by fear of infection. And it was not long before hatred discourses surfaced in this crisis with Muslim, north-eastern, tribal or Dalit Indians, all being accused of spreading the virus. It is yet to observe whether and how the government will take the opportunity of this crisis to further divide or re-unite its people. The immediate concern is for the poor and the minorities, who as we have seen, will be the first to suffer from this crisis. For them, the consequences of the lockdown will be dramatic. They will die at home, in silence, maybe from a much deadlier thing than the virus itself: the profound socioeconomic inequalities that divide Indian society.