This appeared first on LinkedIn.
Fear is a silent killer, with no external cure that may be prescribed.
I’m right and so, you’re a murderer.
The problem is that fear in itself has become the mark of righteousness for those that can afford to sit at home, and anyone not subscribing to it is seen as a criminal/sinner where their crime is a vague “putting others in danger,” a charge that curiously does not seem to apply to TB patients.
For those who do not know: look up information about TB, which is far more dangerous, with a higher mortality rate, far more easily transmitted, and with a much larger infected population just in India.
Let me help:
- TB infected over 29.6 lakh Indians in 2018, of which 4.497 lakh died (with 9,700 of them having a combination of HIV and TB), affecting 1,990 Indians and killing about 323 per 10 lakh population (Source: TBFacts.org). That, to save you a trip to the calculator, is an infection mortality rate of 15.20%, give or take something for under-reporting, wrong diagnosis, and so on.
- Covid19 figures, in comparison (decidedly for a much shorter period of 5 months (the first case detected 30 January 2020) stand at today (25 June 2020) at 4.73 lakh infected, 14,907 dead, which is 343 infected and 11 dead per 10 lakh Indians (Source: Worldometer). The infection mortality rate stands at around 3.15%. Now, knowing that Covid19 tests (unlike TB) are at a nascent stage and there are many undiagnosed patients, false negatives, as well as a vast number of asymptomatic cases (50-80%, depending on who is reading the data), it is quite likely that the actual mortality rate may be substantially lower.
For those who say,
“But TB is caused by a bacteria and has a cure as well as a vaccine,”
I say that proves my point, that something much more deadly in theory (a virus without a currently known cure or vaccine) seems to be so much less deadly than feared when seen in the clear light of data, and we seem to be reacting to something that is multiple times less likely to affect or kill you in a manner not known even before the TB vaccine was brought to India in 1948. In jest, I even say,
“Yes, my grandfather constantly spoke of the Great Indian Shutdown of 1947 and how it stopped certain extinction of our species by TB.”
Jokes apart, the truth is that when we have not stopped everything in its tracks for a disease that is as deadly (and even before we found a cure or a vaccine) and kills, even after a vaccine and cure, 30 times more people per capita and affects 6x more people in India year on year, decade-on-decade for the past 72 years at the very least), why are we over-reacting to this one even after the data is out?
So, the question is simple:
If India has not, and never did, shut down for the fear of a TB pandemic, why have we locked down so comprehensively for something far less dangerous, less contagious, and less life-threatening, if not for a media-generated fear?
Let me admit that when we did not know the mortality rate or transmission, or even what this virus was, it was a probably good idea to shut down so comprehensively so quickly. But now that we are more aware, is fear still a valid reason to cause such untold misery to hundreds of millions across the country? Especially when there is no agreement even among experts about how exactly this is affecting or likely to affect India and Indians?
What do the experts agree on?
Wear a mask, wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough/sneeze, keep a reasonable distance from others and get yourself tested/admitted if you show any symptoms.
But stopping everything in its track, while surely pausing the immediate march of the pandemic, will neither stop it, nor slow it anymore, given that community transmission seems to be in full swing. Best is to go on with one’s life and take all the precautions one can. We could have a vaccine maybe soon, maybe sometime later. There is literally no practical or rational reason to stay locked up in our houses.
The cure to a deadly disease cannot be death by starvation. The solution to fear cannot be eternal solitary confinement.
So, do I think I know more than the professionals?
I am a nobody and cannot suggest what people far smarter, far more educated, and far more powerful than I should or shouldn’t do. What I do know is that there is no transparency and no visual. That means I, as a citizen, have zero visibility about escalation or de-escalation of the lockdown or the various measures put in place.
I would have hoped for a matrix where perhaps the administration can publicly state at what point in terms of whatever measurable metrics they want to define the pandemic situation with, they will lock this or that down. How many infections in how many independent households of how severe a nature, or how many people on oxygen, or how many people on ventilator, or how many deaths makes for a containment zone, or how many people discharged means we can allow the opening of restaurants or cinema halls or walking plazas or vegetable markets or schools or whatever.
At present, the first number (the requirement for closing down an area or a suburb or a ward or a city or even an entire state) seems to vary wildly from 1 to whatever imaginary number you can think of, and the second number (the requirement for opening up something as simple as allowing people to walk or allowing the IPL to be conducted with full stadia) seems to be something between any random number pulled from a bureaucrat’s hat and zero.
This is impossible. Everything is ad hoc. Everything is discretionary. Everything is decided at the last moment. Everything is open to interpretation. Everything is vague. Everything is “case-to-case.” Everything is reversible. Everything is random.
A new, old society
This will not end well. No, I do not mean that the pandemic will run through the human race and we will all go extinct. I mean that the pandemic will create a culture of fear, and a kind of pride in one’s fear, and a partitioning of humans by how much fear they can afford to be righteously indignant and snarky with others about.
A new caste system, where purity and distance, segregation and exclusivity, and xenophobia and intolerance, will give rise to a new kind of society. A society we have fought for around 800 years to rid ourselves of, and have only recently started having some spectacular successes. Are we looking at a regression to where we were a millennium ago? Because that is where fear will take us eventually. At least for those it will not starve to death.
Fear in times of the pandemic.
