CORONA HAS STRUCK!!!

A couple of weeks back I was explaining the importance of communication for development and referred to the corona pandemic. One of the students was of the opinion that it was being overhyped. I am sure he has changed his mind by now as the number of those infected by this deadly virus – Covid19 in India has crossed 600. Two weeks back Delhi and NCR were reporting its first cases. This figure has already multiplied several times.

I am touching 65 years and have never experienced anything like it in my lifetime. I was born seven years after independence and by the time I reached school deaths in large numbers were to be encountered only in history books. The most recent at that time used to be about the Bengal famine and the violent clashes that accompanied partition of India.

Of course, there were still some killer infectious diseases around like  small pox  and cholera with typhoid thrown into the mixture. School children were administered vaccines for small pox – the liquid vaccine would be put on the soft inside part of our forearms and the skin lacerated with the help of pins embedded in a small disc at the end of a steel shaft. They were usually not very painful though some people did react somewhat adversely with swollen arms and fever. The painful one was a vaccine known as TABC that was injected in the biceps.

Personally speaking, I never came across anyone suffering from any of the above infections though one could see some people with deep small pox scars. ‘Pockmark’ was the epithet used by sailors, no doubt for those of their colleagues who thad been victims of this usually deadly disease. But by the time I was heading out of school, small pox vaccinations were discontinued and we were told that the scourge had been wiped out of India.

Those had been days of the victory of the medical world over microbe and someone had even thoughtfully compiled the biographies of doctors who had developed anti-dotes for some killer pathogens. I have forgotten the name of the author but the title of the book was ‘The Microbe Hunters’ and contained the names of such pioneers and Robert Koch, Ronald Ross, Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur.

But the situation now is just a reverse of it and a microbe is threatening to overwhelm man with all his technology and ego. What perhaps is the most shocking is that its victims as of now are mostly in the world’s most industrialised countries. Usually it is the fate of poor Asians and Africans to bear the brunt of disease and death. Who ever could imagine that a country like Italy or Britain or the United States could face the wrath of the deadly pandemic with a confused response from their leaderships. If this could happen to them, what lies in store for us, is the question on the minds of many Indians.