Author: Oindrila Ghosh Page 1 of 3

Disclaimer: This article is long. I will totally empathize with you if you feel it got too tedious to read it till the last word and hence will interrupt the following paragraphs with some pictures taken over the stay-in-home period in order to keep you entertained.

A couple of weeks ago, some time in March, as Aniruddha and I were out for a stroll getting some mandatory fresh air (as recommended by WHO under the COVID 19 pandemic situation of 2020) within 10 meters of our house, we looked at the beautiful evening spring sky and I said, “You know, ours will be the generation that got to stay at home from work for an indefinite period of time because there is some bad-ass virus out there that is killing people of flu like symptoms and pneumonia!”

“Yeah! We could tell this to our grandchildren much like how ours tell us- how difficult things were during their times and how easier things have become now”, he said.

“Is it so bad after all, staying at home? I mean, getting up early, making breakfast, packing lunch, rushing to the lab every morning to get daily chores done- did not give me time to stay in and do things I always wanted to do like cooking, painting, reading books, watching movies, talk to family everyday! Frankly, I am not feeling that bad!”, I said. “But it is true that I get bored sometimes, you know, not seeing the people I work with or not having my samples waiting for me to get analyzed everyday. It kind of makes me feel as if I am not getting to do what I am good at or what I am meant to do.”, I said after thinking a little.

“Yeah! I understand. I would feel the same staying away from work for so long”, Aniruddha agreed. His work of being a computer scientist involves implementing ideas through computer codes and is achievable from home, as long as he has access to the right servers, fortunately. That is unfortunately not the case for an environmental scientist like me, whose work mainly involves analyzing samples from the field in the laboratory and making sense of the results in a broader perspective, after some rigorous data analysis. However, the single point that we both agree on is the fact that meeting with the people you work with, on a daily basis, keeps you motivated, makes you feel good to be around folks who understand your work, and can empathize with you at your failures and help you out of them. It does relieve you of an awful lot of stress and make you feel better about yourself.

My uncle called me one afternoon in the month of April 2020 asking me how I was and how grave the situation of the pandemic was in the neighborhood that I stay in. I was not affected by his ‘questions and concerns’ because such ‘questions and concerns’ are pretty common these days from relatives, friends and family members. But I was concerned when these started taking a different shape, mostly in the form of opinions, the interesting idea at the core of these opinions was- ‘How did USA prove to be a more developed country in handling the pandemic in comparison to the poorer countries like India who apparently handled the situation better?’.

While I did understand that this question is not as simple to answer as easily it was asked, I also realized how ill equipped I was to support my arguments. I had given up watching the news because it only made me more anxious. I kept watching recipes online and replicating them at home, enjoying the process of cooking, eating and working from home. But this phone call and a couple of more comments from some of my family members and Aniruddha’s, made me realize eventually how important it was to look at the whole thing more holistically, understand how and why things happened and what the real indicators were in analyzing a situation as complex as this.

So on the morning of 15 April 2020, I sent out voice messages to 2 group chats and one individual chat on WhatsApp, to friends from different fields of work, requesting them to share their insights on HOW and WHY the developed and developing economies across the globe handled the COVID 19 pandemic situation differently. The friends I talked to, shared all sorts of information and insights. One of them, a school friend, Anusheela, in particular, was quite generous to give me way more time than I expected. What came out of the discussion was a great summary of the strategies and points of failure in management of the situation for the individual countries and a set of unique reasons of their own. A general take-away of the discussion was that, the terms developing and developed economies are not great ways of analyzing who did a better job at managing the pandemic of 2020.

The terms developed and developing countries are thrown so irresponsibly and often ignorantly around by many, including me. I was very ashamed of myself when I found an entire assignment in my Masters dedicated to understanding these terms well. Dr. Somnath Bandyopadhyay did his job well. Only I got lousy. Development mainly takes into account the economic development or, in the more contemporary classification system, the human development. The main indicators of either of these classification systems are the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and per capita income for the first case while education, health and life expectancy for the latter. In a given country with a unique demographic and historical backdrop, these indicators interact among themselves in a cause-feedback system that impacts the socio-political decisions, in a way that can be very different from another country per se. Under such circumstances, it is very unfair to rank different countries with very different historical, cultural, demographic, socio-economic and political backgrounds on a scale that essentially involves very limited number of indicators and does not look at the how and why of the current scenario they are in.

The branches on a tree has but one root- the one beneath the ground!

The pandemic broke out in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The exact source of breakout is still under investigation. But certain ongoing studies suspect the source to be zoonotic spillover from bats, which lose immunity to existing pathogens in their body, when they face challenges like habitat loss and are caged. After the breakout, the Chinese government passed a law in late January, 2020 for ‘lockdown’ in and around Wuhan compelling people to stay indoors. All this time between the outbreak and the lockdown, people had traveled from Wuhan to other parts of China and the world. The rest of China was not under any kind of lockdown till almost February. The Chinese did start of by informing the WHO about the cluster of pneumonia cases in early January, but by the time they got aware that the disease had spread to other parts of China, they decided not to give out all the information to the world. This mislead people to how contagious the virus was. USA and several European countries banned flights and were screening people only from Wuhan. Flights from mainland China were still allowed. Right at this stage of the spread, the lack of proper communication and transparency of information from China, an economy that is historically famous for keeping secrets for political reasons, was a dominating cause behind the current scale of the pandemic.

South Koreans: The Late Neanderthals of the 21st century!

The ‘late’ neanderthals “could respond to some change in their environment, that required them to improve their technology. They could behave like modern humans,” said archaeologist Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in an article titled Rethinking Neanderthals by Joe Alper that was published in the Smithsonian Magazine in June 2003.

New cases broke out in every part of the world starting with Thailand in mid January, the USA and South Korea in late January, the Philippines in early Feb, several countries in Europe in mid Feb and Iran in late February.

The South Koreans had started implementing enhanced quarantine and screening measures for visitors from Wuhan since early January. Several hospitals were announced to isolate the confirmed and suspected cases while rapid diagnostic tests for novel coronavirus (nCoV) were made available at Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), environmental research institutes, private clinics and medical centres. A new diagnostic system was developed that could detect the virus in less than six hours and was made available to several health facilities starting early February. South Korea witnessed the major surge of cases from a community gathering at a church in Shincheonji, Daegu and another hospital where coronavirus cases were being tested at the time. Alarmed at the upsurge, the mayor of the Seoul city prosecuted some of the key leaders of the Church for hiding the identities of the suspected during contact tracing investigation and the government raised the alert level to the highest, Red, on 23 February. New medical laws were passed by the South Korean cabinet early March ‘allowing it to prosecute coronavirus-suspected people who don’t co-operate to get tested for the nCoV’. Several new laws and amendments to existing laws allowed the nation ‘to refuse entry to people confirmed or suspected to have contracted the coronavirus disease and ban export or transfer of masks and other items to other countries.’ (Coronavirus in South Korea: COVID-19 outbreak, measures and impact. Praveen Duddu. April 2, 2020. Pharmaceutical Technology)

When South Korea faced the MERS crisis, due to the inadequate management of the situation, the approval rate of the previous President had fallen to 29%. The approval rating of the current President Moon Jae-in rose from 44% to 49% in March in response to the measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis, thereby proving themselves as the ‘late Neanderthals’ of the century who learned from their previous mistakes and adapted fast.

Dwindling to little: Italy.

A few months before the outbreak in the land of the Sopranos, sometime in early November 2019, I came across this article about how the Italian government was giving away houses for a little over one US dollar, in rural village of Zungoli and another town Mussomeli, to combat depopulation in these towns. While the obvious aim of the government was to attract new residents in these towns, it also reminded me of the situation in Japan, that I read a couple of years back. Japan was encouraging couples to engage in increasing their family because of the dwindling working age-group of the population, by expanding family policies and programes in the form of childcare services, parental leave schemes and monetary assistance in the form of child allowances. Aniruddha had been away for three months in California for an internship and had returned to Baltimore in September. Our lives looked greener after a long drought. So I had scrolled down after reading the news, smirking at the first world problems the planet is capable of having!

What I did not realize back then and I am sure even the Italians were nothing different, though their government could foresee things, was that maybe the country’s age pyramid needed some attention. When the pandemic hit Italy in February this year, people above the age of 60, comprising a great percentage of the population of the country, with lower immunity were dying like flies. This gave the younger lot a misconception, that they were more immune and not prone to being infected. Thus, the younger (and less wiser) section of the society proved to be active participants in spreading the disease until very late. This, accompanied with the privatization of the healthcare sectors in Italy made medical facilities often not affordable and later not available with the rising number of cases. Doctors were forced to choose between equally critical cases in order to accommodate new infected patients.

The German exception

The mortality rate due to the pandemic was lowest for Germany; even lower than South Korea. European countries, Italy and Germany included, do fall in the so called ‘developed’ economy category; so why the anomaly?

The most important reason was the fact that the average age of those infected were lower in Germany than in many other countries. Many of the early patients caught the virus in Austrian and Italian ski resorts and were relatively young and healthy. Germany was testing far more people than most nations and so they caught more people with few or no symptoms, increasing the number of known cases, but not the number of fatalities.

The Charité hospital in Berlin had already developed a test and posted the formula online in mid- January, much before the Germans had given much thought. The Chinese government had just passed the law for lockdown only around Wuhan. The Italians were still young in their blood. Donald Trump, here in America had still not started saying that America has gotten things under control. By the time Germany recorded its first case of Covid-19 in February, laboratories across the country had built up a stock of test kits. Corona Taxis, outfitted in protective gear were driving around the empty streets of Heidelberg to check on patients who are at home, five or six days into being sick with the coronavirus. In addition, patients were paying nothing for testing; it was all free! (A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low. Katrin Bennhold. April 6, 2020. NY Times)

Desi Vibes.

I was working late in the afternoon in the lab one Friday, sometime in late February, when I heard people talking in the hallway, about the various filters in masks, that were still not totally out-of-stock back then, here in USA. I was a little famished after the day’s work myself and needed to fill my water bottle and so got an excuse to be a part of the discussion. I went out to the hallway and saw, Ehsan, a fellow PhD research assistant from Iran and Louis, an undergraduate from our lab, discussing over the topic. Ehsan (a very knowledgeable guy, by the way) was in a gravely serious tone, like he is in almost everything he talks about, asking Louis about the respirator that he was using in the lab while working on soldering metal pieces together. I immediately got interested in the topic and got to know how the Iranians were starting to see new cases everyday. Ehsan had asked his family members to stay indoors as much as possible. To be really honest, I felt he was over-worrying back then. By the time I got back from work that day, the little chat with Ehsan and Louis was just a passing event of the day and while flipping parathas on the stove, I told Aniruddha, “The guy is planning to order a couple of masks for himself! He is damn serious about it, you know!”

By the middle of March, when the university closed for the spring break, I did somehow foresee that the labs would probably not be accessible once again some time soon and so, backed up all my work on the drive. I have stayed home since then, except one Friday seven days after the university closed (I had to check on a sample from a running experiment), a few biweekly visits to the grocery stores and the occasional walks, when it would get too claustrophobic inside the house. I checked up on my Iranian friends when the number of cases spiked after the Iranian new year of Nowruz. Fortunately, their family members were all safe. My family members, by the way, back in India were still going to work! My mother, who you guys should know is a paranoid person about her work, as I have mentioned in my article before, and Aniruddha’s mother, who is also a teacher in the same school as my mother, were making sure each day that we were staying indoors. However, they themselves were still going to work. My father, who is a state government employee in the state of West Bengal was going to work too. They were both very much aware of the situations around the globe as were their employers. But things take time to sink in and go through the hierarchy of processes to finally get established, in certain parts of the world! Majority of Indians do not visit the dentist unless something is really hurting their gums!

The current Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi did make a noble effort to handle the situation, starting from initiating the lockdown around 24th March. By the time my mother’s school closed, however, it was almost the first week of April. My father too had stopped going for work by then. This alone proved that the lockdown, even though was initiated somewhat before situations got worse, the severity of its enforcement was questionable in the beginning. However, the number of flights that entered India before the lockdown started, and infiltration from the port cities, somehow, were not as bad as compared to USA. The stage where the virus would spread from foreign infiltration was not as saturated for India as compared to USA, where far more number of people travel internationally on a daily basis. For a country that is as densely packed as India, this aspect combined with the higher number of younger people and the Prime Minister’s step for a reasonably timed lockdown across the country, served as a boon. Some might argue that the Indian healthcare system is cheaper, and hence more accessible as compared to Italy, and is thus, also a reason why things did not get as bad as Italy or USA. However, I do not fully agree with that. I think, had the lockdown not started right in time to stop the international flights to come in, and had the country been as rapidly infected as Italy or USA, the fate of the hospitals and health care facilities housing as many infected Indians from varied socio-economic backgrounds, would not be quite different. But obviously, not many of the Indians who have decision-making powers in the country sat down arguing about these scenarios before the pandemic broke out.

In addition to the praiseworthy step of the Prime Minister in initiating the lockdown, he took up an assignment at a more moral level to ask Indians, while maintaining social distancing, to pay their respect to the doctors and nurses in the country for the commendable job they were doing. People, obviously, misunderstood the message and organized a massive celebration on the streets, thereby ruining the real aim of the whole thing. The Prime Minister took it a notch higher by assigning people another job at a more cultural level. At this point, these assignments made no more sense scientifically. He asked the Indians to light candles and lamps at home on a particular day at a particular time. It served no other purpose other than making staying-at-home a little more exciting, if you ask me. But who cares? The Prime Minister had lost it by now much like the people, who obviously misunderstood and came down on the streets bursting crackers that entire night.

In a country, where majority of the people find it hard to understand and implement specific instructions, the idea of a pandemic, that comes with simple flu like symptoms, is nothing more than a funny little disease. Of course there are exceptions. When I was discussing the content of this article with my school friend Anusheela, she mentioned how people in a village in Bankura, a western district in the state of West Bengal, would make fellow villagers returning home, during lockdown from other parts of the country, stay in a bamboo shack for several weeks in isolation, away from their family members. However, in several other parts of the country, it is nothing different from the regular flu that hits the population every now and then during any change of season. People die in road accidents, in major numbers, each day due to poor abiding of traffic rules. The idea of going to the hospital for getting tested for something as trivial as flu, is too far fetched.

Remember the ‘learning from history’ aspect that I was mentioning before, which the Koreans adopted? India, historically has been subject to several epidemics starting from the cholera pandemic of the 19th and early 20th century, the flu pandemic of 1918, small pox of 1974, plague of 1994 and swine flu most recently in 2009. It is partly because of this history and the fact that a developing country like India is more prone to these deadly diseases, that the country is also somewhat armored up in terms of vaccine development skills and pharmaceutical companies invest in development of new formulas to develop vaccinations in bulk. However, the general not-so-educated people, often do not face the implications of a pandemic in one lifetime, and disregard the potential a simple flu like symptom holds, in destroying an entire population.

But then, it is easier to manage a crowd that is not as educated. Violence is usually the most effective tool to manage crowds, though it is not just the uneducated who suffer lathi charges in India anymore! In certain parts of Uttar Pradesh people were sprayed with disinfecting chemical sodium hypochlorite with a garden hose (We know where Trump got the idea now!). While in some cases, it is important to be strict with people who do not understand the implication of things, it is also easier to make them victims of overzealous, untested theories that can harm them instead. Striking an optimum is probably the need of the hour. But who do we expect to do the proper calculations for reaching that optimum, from? Laws in India are purposely kept open ended for interpretation, much like the assignments that the Prime Minister whimsically sets. The most relevant example for this is how in spite of legalizing lockdown across the country, religious gatherings are not subject to arrest under the Indian Law. However, a lathi charge on a religious gathering during lockdown is a more feasible option to carry out. The Nizamuddin gathering in Delhi was an example of this. Oh, and interestingly, there was no lathi charge on the decisive lot who went back to start the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya after the national lockdown!

Remember when I said before that it all started with a bad root of non-transparency of information in China? West Bengal’s Chief Minister is ahead in the game of keeping things under the table. If there is a sudden surge in the number of cases in the future, god forbid that happens, you would know why! Much like China, the Bengal state government is testing only severe cases of the virus. While China would disregard asymptomatic cases, doctors in Bengal have been asked (we became aware of this from a friend here whose parents are doctors in Kolkata) to not count the deaths of patients who had acquired the infection in addition to a pre-existing condition. Doubts arose when the number of deaths started falling in West Bengal, while the rest of the country was still struggling with rising number of deaths due to COVID19. This was in absolute contrast to how the state of Kerala managed to achieve flattening of the curve with aggressive testing, contact tracing, building thousands of shelters for migrant workers stranded by the sudden nationwide shutdown and distributing millions of cooked meals to those in need. Kerala managed to strike that ‘optimum’, I was talking about before, with both strict and humane approach of handling the situation.

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“Ladki toh videshi ho gyi h”: Videshi Vibes

The first time I was coming to USA in 2017, there was a vibe that was going around me. My mother was not a part of it, because she knows me more than anyone else. Everyone who would come to visit us in the last month of me being in India before I left, would at least once say, “Don’t forget us! Do give us a call once in a couple of months.” My mother, though she calls me at least once everyday, never said this to me. My father, on the other hand, did mention on the last day, “See that you do not forget home.” The first summer I visited home, everyone whose house we visited or who visited us would say, “Oh! Titli has come from USA” and ask my mother, “Has her ways become videshi (foreign)?” My mother would calmly say,”I don’t think so. She is still the very Bengali girl she left as.” There was this one day during that first visit home when my father gave me a nail filer that he had bought for himself and asked me if I would like to take it back with me. When I said that I already had one, I saw that he did not take it well and replied, “Yeah, I am sure things are much better there!” I realized immediately that maybe, I should have just taken it.

When the pandemic hit and I was a week into staying home from work for an indefinite period of time, I missed home. I realized, this was the time everyone would be home from their work- my mother and my father. We would have our own little family time, something we have not had in ages. Maybe, it would have its own shortcomings with all the micro-managing traits of Indian parents, had I really been there. But at least it made me realize how strongly I felt about being home. It is very unlikely that when someone comes to a different country, they forget home. A change of institution can nuance your values and choices, but it can barely totally change the virtues you started with, in the first place. When my uncle called me that afternoon in April, somewhere in the whole question of ‘how did USA prove to be a developed country in handling the pandemic’, I felt a tinge of the hidden sentence before the above one: ‘I know you chose to leave for better education in a more developed country, but..’. Maybe, it is all in my head (I can be quite complicated a person, I have been told! But then, who is not?). Or maybe, I feel this way because every time I called my uncle before this, he mentioned that I am a videshi now! But anyway, truth be told, USA did not do a great job, there is no denying.

The world is well educated about the ridiculous claims of Donald Trump about things being under control, even though there was no sign of any such progress in terms of making more testing kits available, for a start and the hilarious but dangerous press announcements about injecting disinfectant in humans. However, the decentralized form of government and the areas of jurisdiction that fall under the federal and state governments, is something that is prime to understanding how and why things were managed (or mismanaged). The Illinois government shut down the Lake Shore Drive, one of the important roads connecting Chicago to other states in early February. In Maryland, governor Larry Hogan ordered arrests for any gathering of 10 or more people and ‘issued an executive order, making it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, a fine of up to $5,000, or both, for people to hold large gatherings’, around mid March.  New York government, on the other hand, had kept the state border open until late March when Donald Trump advised otherwise as the number of cases surpassed 52k.

The other aspect of the challenge is law enforcement in USA. People would not take lathi charges here! In Florida, in spite of the aggravating number of cases, people were pressing on their rights to party during their spring break! Florida governor passed the order for residents to stay home to avoid Coronavirus as late as 1st April and is currently planning to make re-opening announcements this week. My friend in Orlando mentioned in a recent phone call that people have come down to streets protesting against the stay-at-home order.

However, the bright side of the story is that the numbers are transparent. In Maryland there is an online portal, for example, that is updated with the number of new cases everyday at 10AM. Recent developments made to provide more detailed statistics of the new cases at each zip code; graphs showing the number of hospitalizations, ICU and acute beds in use; age, gender and racial distribution of the number of affected cases- only kept the general people more informed about the situations and helped them be more aware. Interestingly, the number of cases and deaths due to the COVID19 among Asians are quite low and Aniruddha pointed this out one morning. We were both wondering what could be the possible reason for that, until we came across the Maryland census and realized that only 6% of the population of Maryland are Asians, which means that the sample size for Asians was smaller in the first place. What is more intriguing, is the fact that, while 50% of Marylanders are White and 29% Black, the number of confirmed cases among African Americans are more than Whites!

After all the rambling of stories across the world and some stories of my own, I realize that maybe it could be summarized in just a couple of sentences. While dealing with a global crisis, there is not just one reason to why the spread of a continuously mutating virus took the shape of a pandemic. Every country had their own little important part in it to handle things differently. It is the choices at the hour made, that created significant impacts starting from the delay of response and opacity in information to creating stocks of testing kits beforehand and being ready for any adversity. Also, it is not just the government to blame every time. Decisions and choices at a personal level play a very significant role in handling a crisis like this. Saying NO to parties, going out to restaurants, organizing mindless processions on the streets, disregarding the ultimate aim of specific instructions are decisions made at a personal level. This is not to disregard the absolute atrocious claims and unpreparedness of leading economies of the world. But, no set of laws can govern a person who has his own decision making skills paralyzed. Staying informed from legit sources and staying indoors are the only instructions to follow right now that can shape a near and safer future. Stay home. Stay safe. This too shall pass.