write a debate on the topic declaration of lockdown just in the beginning stage of covid 19 was a correct step taken by the government in against .
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Answer:
Is the coronavirus lockdown justified? One school of thought holds that any societal cost is worth paying to save a life. This seems sensible at first, but we do not honor this dictum in normal times, either in India or globally. We tolerate people dying for lack of resources, often on a mass scale, in developing countries.
A pandemic raises questions about the processes of decision-making and prioritising in a democracy, such as India.
Rough estimates suggest that India has at best a similar number of ventilators as does the United States, but it has four times the population. A high proportion of these ventilators were very likely being used already before the pandemic struck. Even if there is a massive increase in hospital capacity, the case for slowing the spread of Covid-19 in India must be centered on preventing serious illnesses rather than on ensuring the availability of ventilators by spreading their use over time.
But suppressing the virus temporarily may not prevent it from becoming widespread later. The absence of a vaccine coupled with the limitations of poor health infrastructure in India will make doing so challenging. Hence, a lockdown may be less successful than anticipated. Twenty one days is insufficient to ensure the exhaustion of the virus within households. Even with perfect compliance with the lockdown, it may well resume its spread, unless arrested by climatic or other factors (such as a vigorous mass testing and quarantine program, for which India presently has little capacity).
India’s average expenditure on health is far below that of other developing countries, showing it to be a relatively low governmental priority.
Health expenditure in India amounts to 3.7 per cent of the GDP, of which only around a quarter is government expenditure. This is substantially below the low- and middle- income country average of 5.4 per cent, of which nearly half comes from the government.
Moreover, those who die are often young. This is one reason that India’s life expectancy of 68.5 years, despite rapid increases in recent years, is still 10 years less than in the US and 17 years less than in Spain. There were roughly 1 crore deaths in India in 2018 of which more than 12 per cent are attributable to air pollution. Nearly 7 per cent were caused by diarrheal diseases, 5 per cent by tuberculosis and more than 2 per cent by road injuries.
In each of these cases, there was considerable room for public policy efforts to reduce deaths further, through prevention as well as cure.
The risk of death, in particular from preventable diseases, is unevenly distributed by class, caste, region, and gender. But Covid-19, as a highly infectious disease, seems to threaten people, especially the elderly, of all classes. Some of the other causes of death are known to be disproportionately experienced by those who are poor or socially disadvantaged
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