Running at over three lakh daily infection cases and over 4,000 deaths a day, the national Covid19 scenario remains grim. Yet, the positive signs are that both Delhi and Mumbai which are among the worst-hit have registered a curve in daily rates and deaths, and that the positivity rate in the capital has come down to around 10 per cent as on Sunday. We were on a roll prematurely soon after the ‘first wave’ and are paying a huge price for this.
Governments have woken up. Some eight brands of vaccines are to be made available for use in India, largely drawn from abroad, rather than us depending on the two or three home-made ones. The oxygen position is improving while ventilators and hospital beds are faced with shortages. There are no quick overnight fixes and only a steady improvement on these fronts need be expected. There were reports about ventilators supplied to hospitals under PM Care across the country which did not meet the required standards. The PMO is aware of these and corrective steps should follow.The fight against Covid would continue at three principal fronts – namely to vaccinate maximum number of people, force people to observe protocols and better equip hospitals with facilities. As the Delhi high court rightly stated weeks ago, this is the time for the official agencies to “beg, borrow, steal,” or do whatever else to fill the gaps between requirements and supply positions.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has called a spade a spade when he said there was both laxity and over-confidence among the governments and the officials after the first wave — even when the nation was in anticipation of a second or even a third wave as is now feared. He rightly stressed that “we all” erred, including the people who threw caution to the winds and were game with festivals and election campaigns by wantonly ignoring the C-protocols. All these took the nation to the edge of a precipice in terms of the pandemic’s bloody surge. Strict controls, rather, helped China to sit back and relax now. The permissiveness here proved to be deadly and people are dying like flies, so much so dead bodies are either discarded in rivers or buried in the sand – the stark indignity in death. The nation has lessons to learn from this. The governments as also entities like the election commission must conduct themselves with a better sense of responsibility. What has already happened cannot be undone and those who erred, and grossly at that, might be called up on to answer for their indulgences that brought the situation to such a scary level.
