write an article about 120-150 words on the theme of crisis of covide-19 pandemic class 12th
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Explanation:
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.
Testing is crucial to gauge the extent of Covid-19 transmission in any country. India currently has one of the lowest ratios of testing in the world, which may have masked coronavirus cases. As of March 23rd, the total number of individuals tested for Covid-19 across the country was 17,493. The same week, South Korea was carrying out more than 5,500 tests per million people, Italy 2,500 per million, the United Kingdom close to 1,500 and France around 900. Even if the epidemic outbreak was ahead in these countries, India lags at just 10 tests per million. Until the national lockdown, the testing strategy of the government was relying on the assumption that no community transmission was happening in India, and that there were only foreign imported cases. Basing the testing strategy on this and testing only people coming from infected areas abroad may have unintended consequences on the spreading of the epidemic. Indeed, with the lockdown, a large amount of workers migrated internally from existing hotspots like Mumbai and Delhi towards their home states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Failure to acknowledge presence of Covid-19 infections in the community and failure to test all symptomatics in Mumbai or Delhi itself may have exposed these states to the diffusion of the virus and a potential explosion of cases, in places where health infrastructures are poorer.
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.