COVID-19:  What can an ‘over prepared’ government do to let people die with less fuss?

There is no cure for the coronavirus induced disease (COVID-19). Period. Too bad if you have been infected. Take a paracetamol tablet and hope that you recover.

If you are diabetic, have a lung or kidney condition, or you are hypertensive and generally your immunity is low, pray.

If you are well off and have strings to pull, try and see if you can get hold of a portable oxygen cylinder, which is in short supply and scarce.

If you don’t have strings, don’t have private transport and still have people at home who are suffering from breathing trouble, beg everybody you know for a hospital bed with ventilator—and ensure they suffer less before they die.

In short, you are on your own and there is little or nothing that the Government or the hospitals can do. The guidelines being issued are confusing, often contradictory and keep changing. The Arogya Setu App, even the Prime Minister would have realised by now, is not meant to keep you safe. It is meant to help administrators identify the hotspots and do a bit of snooping on the side by way of pastime.

What does get your goat though are accounts of people in need not getting ambulances with ventilator support; or when apps show beds are available in a hospital but the hospital claims it is full. Or when the app informs that a certain Covid hospital has zero occupancy and when you reach there, you are told that the occupancy is nil because it would take the hospital two or three weeks to get ready.

Delhi, ironically, took pride in its ‘Mohalla Clinics’, model schools and the public health system. Unlike government hospitals in most other cities, it had a large number of reasonably efficient government hospitals, led by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Delhi Government claimed that it was four steps ahead of the virus. The Health ministry officials said the country was actually over-prepared!

But the ‘over-prepared’ government does not seem to have got even the protocols in place. Doctors and nurses continue to complain of poor facilities and protection—and the Government continues to treat them as errant citizens who deserve the danda.

Banging pots and showering petals having failed to assuage the medical fraternity, and even after turning the assault of medical personnel as cognisable criminal offence, the ungrateful lot are not pacified. The Government is now arm-twisting them to work for longer hours.

Nor has the Government been able to regulate the supply and prices of masks, sanitisers and PPEs. With both doctors and nurses in short supply, it is also not surprising that a large number of them prefer returning home or seek better prospects elsewhere. Nurses from Kerala apparently would like to return to their home state while one hears that Kolkata is facing a crisis after nurses from Manipur left en masse to go back home. And as more doctors and nurses get infected and get quarantined, their shortage becomes more acute.

What do we then expect the government to do? The public health system cannot improve overnight or become efficient. The ‘over prepared’ government cannot arrange for ventilators in a hurry or add to the number of beds or doctors or nurses. It cannot regulate supply or prices. It cannot provide ambulances with ventilators when required. It cannot make Helplines respond in real time.

So, what can we realistically expect the Government to do?

1. All Governments are good at forming committees. So, every police station can be asked to constitute a committee with local doctors, teachers, RWA representatives, the local MLA, NGOs and representatives of charitable trusts and political parties. Allow these committees to chalk out strategies.

2. Police stations have a list of senior citizens. Let local police stations control a small team of lab assistants and ambulances to collect samples for testing from home, in consultation with the committee.

3. Let these local committees link up with quarantine centres and Covid hospitals.

Decentralise the effort and take the help of civil society to help each other.

Help citizens to at least die with dignity and the least amount of pain. Don’t expect the Government to do more. Communities must become, well, self-reliant.