Gearing up for the ‘New Normal’
India is opening up, though the pandemic is still not under control. This lulls us into complacency when we can least afford it.
90,632 people tested positive in India yesterday.
Large numbers do not really register, so to put the number in perspective, the first case was detected in India on January 30, 2020. After that, it took 108 days for India to reach a cumulative total of 90,632 cases on May 17, 2020.
May 17, incidentally, was when Lockdown 3.0 ended and the last full Lockdown began. In those 108 days, we had witnessed the initial apathy, the half hearted measures to control, the thali banging and the Lockdown. The entire TJ fiasco had played out, the first wave of the migrant crisis was nearing its end. We had gone the full cycle from making Dalgona coffee to discussing how to give haircuts at home, and reminding ourselves to take care of our mental health. Those two months of Lockdown, with all their attendant anxiety, and we had not yet reached as many positive cases across the country, as we got in just one day yesterday.
No matter which way we look at it, the pandemic is raging unchecked. The number of people testing positive is going up. The virus has now spread beyond the initial hotspots. Even the government is forced to admit in rare moments of honesty that there is community transmission.
Yet, neither the people nor the government seems to be aware of the seriousness of how things continue to be. Organizations are starting to say, ‘this is going to be the new normal. We might as well call people back to work in office.” People are starting to say, “with the metro starting again, I can look forward to traveling again. Maybe I will sit at my favourite seat soon. Things are returning to normal.” A friend told me about how she and her family went out this weekend, shopped a little, went to a temple, ordered an idol for Durga Puja, and had lunch outside- she is in the high risk category herself, and there are senior citizens in her family.
These are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of most of the population. The upper middle class has been locked at home for too long. They are used to going out, traveling, meeting people. They are fed up of being deprived of all that they are used to. Their movements have been restricted for nearly half a year, but the promised miracle hasn’t happened, and there seems to be no end in sight. Fatigue has set in.
And with fatigue, has come impatience and frustration. Since they want to their life to get back to normalcy at the earliest, people have convinced themselves that the pandemic is under control and they can get back to normal life.
Even the more sensible people have fallen prey to it. They think that by wearing pretty handloom masks and meeting people in small groups, they are taking sufficient precautions. But they do not think through on how every small action could lead into a larger one.
During Ganesh Chaturti, for instance, many families called people over to see the idol as they do every year. They might have genuinely believed that they were taking sufficient precautions by reducing the number of people called, but in reality, they were putting themselves and all their guests in danger. The guests took their masks off at home, and they hugged while taking selfies. One guest with a high viral load could easily leave behind enough viruses as aerosols to infect the family of the host and all the guests who visit subsequently. Did anyone consider that? Unlikely, because to most people, “home” is a safe haven.
People are celebrating birthdays, anniversaries and baby showers. The gatherings are small but it is the intimacy that makes them so dangerous. People do not take as many precautions at home as they would in a restaurant, and that is how the virus spreads. The Government of Victoria, for instance, specifically banned gatherings at home because of empirical evidence to back up the fact that this was the second highest method of spread.
The other way of dealing with the pandemic is to tell ourselves that perhaps it was blown out of proportion. Everybody knows a few people who tested positive and were either asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic. They use that to speculate that maybe Corona is not as lethal as it was made out to be. What they choose not to look at is the fact that it was always know that for upto 85% of the people infected by the virus, the symptoms will be at worst ‘mild’. It is the balance for whom it is a deathly disease.
The disease has a fatality rate of anything between 1 to 2%. In India alone over 70,000 people have already officially lost their lives to COVOD-19 and unofficial estimates put the number at anything between 2 to 5 times higher than that number. This is certainly not an insignificant number.
Equally important, even among the people who do not lose their life, there are many who suffer permanent lung and cardiac damage. Not all these people are from the highest risk category either- many are younger people who were not even aware of the co-morbidities because of which they were badly affected. Add these and the disease is certainly not the ‘mild’ disease it is made up to be.
We have to take the disease seriously, and take adequate precautions to ensure that we do not get infected or infect others.
More than anything else, we have to ensure that we do not get complacent, and make mistakes. We see that metro services are being resumed in most cities. Offices are opening up. Gyms and places of worship are already open. Soon educational institutions will also partially open. However, this does not mean that the pandemic is under control.
All that this opening up means is that the nation can no longer afford the economic cost of keeping businesses closed. From our end, it is incumbent that we ensure that we only step out when there are economic compulsions to do so. All non-necessary interactions should still be kept to a minimum, and when absolutely un-avoidable, we should take adequate precautions in terms of masking, maintaining physical distance and practicing hand hygiene.
In the ideal case, the government would have implemented a ‘trace-test-treat’ policy in place by now, where everyone who has come in contact with a person who has tested positive is traced, isolated and tested. Unfortunately, however, this is not being done and the official response is still largely reactive. When a large number of cases come up in one area, it is being deemed a containment zone, or when a member of a family tests positive, the apartment gets sealed off. But there is no strategy to proactively test anyone who may be infected.
We can rage against the government when we, or someone close to us tests positive. We can blame each other for electing governments that do not appear to be doing enough. We can resort to gallows humour and crack jokes about how we are racing ahead to become world leaders in Corona. However, none of it will help. India is one of the few countries where the curve shows no sign of flattening, and it is incumbent on each of us to take all necessary precautions to reduce the spread at least at an individual level.
We need to understand that as of now, there is no vaccine and no miracle cure. Though 2020 has turned out to be a terrible year, the virus will not disappear on December 31 any more than it did after the thali banging incident. It is likely that the virus will remain with us for a long time, and we need to make it second nature to take adequate precautions to slow down the spread of the virus at our end.
Once these four things become something that we do without having to think about it, we will probably start seeing a flattening of the curve, and will over time be able to get back some semblance of a normal life.
