The rise in daily death toll from Covid19 is emotionally draining for a close-knit community. There is the frustration of not being able to attend the funeral of near and dear ones. There is also the psychological distress caused by worry and fear of the loss of livelihoods, of food shortage of loss of educational cycles and a dread about how the future of the children will pan out. These are questions that trouble every citizen now living in dread of contracting the virus or dealing with the illness.
When the second wave hit India by March this year governments were surprisingly taken unawares, despite warnings that this was imminent. The central government was hesitant about imposing another national lockdown after the bitter experiences of March 24, 2020. Also, the economy would not have been able to withstand another hit from a centrally enforced lockdown. It’s a delicate balance between keeping the virus at bay and ensuring the economy was not muzzled. Hence states were left to decide the best course. States too were initially hesitant to impose a complete lockdown and started with containing areas where Covid patients were detected. But that failed to slow the infection rate because public movement could not be stopped. Covid is a travel related disease. The moment the returnees to Meghalaya were told to home- isolate/quarantine the numbers of infected person rose by the day. So too the number of deaths.
Meghalaya was not prepared for the ferocity of the infection. Absence of institutional quarantine centres turned the returnees into prime transmitters of the infection. The total lockdown was late in coming as the infection had already travelled throughout the state. Now there is a huge pressure on the health infrastructure. This is compounded by vaccine hesitancy among the rural populace and also some educated lot, which could have helped a large section of the population develop at least some immunity to the virus. Infectious disease experts at the John Hopkins University, USA explain that about 70% of the population needs to be immune to the coronavirus before herd immunity can work. Without a vaccine, most doctors and scientists agree that a herd immunity approach of letting the virus “take its course” is fatal and would result in thousands of deaths and millions more people left with lasting lung, heart, brain or kidney damage.
Meghalaya has paid a heavy price for slipping on the home isolation bit. And even today, there are instances of those connected to high-risk patients that are roaming around and are not isolated. They get away by pulling political and other strings. A strict regimen is not yet in place. This loophole needs to be instantly plugged. Strict containment of all exposed to the infection is the only way out of the virus predicament.
