Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | The long trauma of Covid: Lessons should be learnt
In November-December 2019, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) new coronavirus, also called SARS-CoV2 or Covid-19 as named by the World Health Organisation, was coming out the shadows as the Chinese doctors noticed cases of pneumonia emerging at a rapid and large scale emerging in Wuhan. It had been traced to the wet market in Wuhan where live animals were sold. There were also the conspiracy theories that there it was a rogue viral strain that had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The numbers in Wuhan were rising dangerously. It was only at the end of January 2020 that WHO declared it as an epidemic of concern and in was only on March 11, 2020 that it had declared Covid-19 a global epidemic. Through 2020 and 2021, the world paid a heavy price in terms of Covid-19 cases and deaths. The numbers were in their millions worldwide. The total number of cases of infection was 770 million, and the global Covid-19 death toll was seven million. The number of deaths were the highest in the United States, with 1.2 million, followed by Brazil with 702,000 and India with 534,000. The Covid-19 vaccines could be rolled out only at the end 2020. For two years, the world reeled under the raging virus, battling the most virulent infection even when people had managed to survive. There is a sense of triumph on the part of governments and major pharmaceutical companies that the vaccines were rolled out and administered, and the epidemic had finally petered out.
The Covid-19 story, however, remains incomplete. There are too many information gaps, especially at the clinical as well as the pharmaceutical research levels. Researchers in journal articles have traced the Covid-19 through the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) of 2012, but they have declared that Covid-19 was different from the other two. Writing in 2020 and 2021, they were not certain about how it was transmitted from the animals to humans, or between humans.
They were also not sure of whether it was passed through a droplet of air or it was just airborne. So, the first few months, there were advisories about washing hands continuously, about not touching knobs on doors. There was a frenzy of washing hands everywhere, so much so that in some cases skin began to peel off. The doctors did not know the exact nature of the virus. And even today, there is no clarity about the matter.
There is not much information available about the details of the impact of Covid-19 on individuals, on families, on communities. At the aggregate level, national economic growth rates have been measured, and the new benchmark in economic discussions is whether the economy has reached the pre-Covid-19 production and consumption levels. There is nothing wrong with the measurement in economic terms. But the other aspects have been literally pushed under the carpet. The emotional impact of those whose family members died, and in some cases the majority of the members of a family had died, and in others the family was reduced to half in size. Yet, there are no accounts of the struggles of the epidemic. If social science and medical researchers are doing their work quietly on these aspects, it remains hidden from the public sphere.
It would seem pertinent that governments should do a post-mortem of the crisis -- the biggest-ever -- they had faced in those two years and after. There have been hostile enquiries in the United Kingdom against the then cavalier handling of the epidemic by then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and against then President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But even in countries like India, where the government is patting itself on its back for dealing with the pandemic by administering more than two billion vaccine doses, and how it had sent vaccine aid to more than 100 countries -- there is a lot of fudging in details, which is perhaps forgivable – and there is need to examine the pandemic experience at various levels. The politicians are busy with elections, the bureaucrats loving nothing more challenging that pushing files, and the people at large are busy struggling with eking out livelihoods. It is the same phenomenon all over the world, and not just in India. It is almost as if there was no epidemic, or that seven million have died, 534,000 of them in India.
Historians, sociologists, psychologists may have much to say about the psychedelic pace of our everyday lives, where new disasters and every new excitement distract our attention so that we can forget about the pain and scars fast enough. Surprisingly, there are no positive stories of the hurdles crossed during the pandemic. How the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out in double-quick time. How the Pune-based Serum Institute of India churned out the Covishield vaccine in hundreds of million dosages, or how Bharat Biotech struggled to churn out the India-made Covaxin vaccine. We have an account from chief vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert at the Jenner Institute in Oxford University. She talked about how the clinical trials moved from mice in February 2020 to human trials in April 2020, and how there was frenetic activity to push out the large number of doses needed by AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company which produced it.
There is a frightening information vacuum in the age of hyper-information and deep data: that people do not know the whole story of Covid-19. There is a lot of legitimate information which should be out in the public domain, but which has been tucked away by researchers, governments and pharmaceutical companies. We need to know a lot more about Covid-19 than what we know now. There are also dark hints about future catastrophes in the form of global epidemics. There is talk about experiments of enhancing the virulence of the virus function to come up with more powerful anti-viral drugs in research circles. We move from the quotidian politics of power struggles to the more diabolical world of scientific research with deadly effects. The phenomenon of the Covid-19 epidemic is more than a passing viral fever. In some ways, SARS-CoV2 has been normalised through the vaccines. It will witness further developments, both in terms of viral mutations and newer vaccines in the pattern of every evolving influenza vial fever and its antidotal vaccines.