 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us for our weekly show talk to Satyajit Rat and we are going to discuss various aspects of COVID-19. Is there any way of controlling the epidemic now in India? Why is it that we do not seem to see any falls in the numbers unlike almost all other countries which have had such large number of incases? Satyajit, looking at this issue, our numbers have been steadily rising. We do not see any fall or even in the new cases. We do not really see a dip in the cases. In the US, for instance, it is dipped twice. Of course, it is also gone up each time. Italy, there is a long dip before it rolls again, second wave as it is being called. But in India, we never saw any dip in the infections. It has been steadily going up in spite of a very draconian lockdown. And the government of India does not seem to have any response to the fact that numbers are not dipping. And we are already at number one in terms of daily infections. And if this rate continues, in another month or so, we are likely to overtake the United States as the most infected place in the world. Yes. So clearly, the situation in the two most populous countries of the world could not be more divergent. Where in one case, the pandemic, if you like, began very early at the end of the last calendar year, not even in 2020. And yet, their total numbers in China are actually less than our, at least some of our recent daily numbers. Whereas, the dramatically different trajectory that the pandemic took with us was that it started very much more slowly. One might almost say it started much later. It gained strong, enduring footholds in communities in India much, much later. And I suspect that part of the reason for that, please let us all keep in mind that much of this is guesswork of trying to make sense of a chaotic situation. But that said, our draconian nationwide lockdown for our notice implemented as a law and order policing problem quite clearly from day one will have had the effect, as we have been saying since then, of delaying establishment and foothold for the infection. Simply because people in the early weeks stayed at home with the resultant economic breakdown, with the resultant non-COVID-19 public health breakdown, not simply treating illness, but also in providing support to pregnant women for children's immunizations in all of this. Because people stayed at home, we simply delayed the takeoff. But the takeoff was always going to happen because you're never going to stop the last possibility of infection. So, the thing that we needed to have done, which we do not clearly seem to have done with any efficiency, is put in place a genuine, reliable community participating, testing to scale, contact tracing to scale, and isolation in practicable, humane, well-supported fashion. We've never done this. Our response still continues to be a policing response. One of the major prominent pieces of COVID-19 pandemic-related news in India over the past few days, for example, is that the police are collecting now X amounts of funds as fines from people who are not wearing masks. And the interesting thing there is, we're not discussing the failure of public outreach of information and true community participation in people not wearing masks. Instead, we are simply addressing how much money we've collected for non-wearing of masks. And this is emblematic of what we've been saying all these months that a public health problem is being treated as a law and order problem. When that has been the consistent approach, it's no surprise that what we are going to have is simply, as I said, a delay in the establishment of the infection in the community because of the draconian lockdown followed by an expansion of the pandemic. As the lockdown weekends are continued rise of numbers, in any case, the lockdown had to break down. You need to give people food which you were not giving. They had their poor migration. So that is in the past and since you bring it up, let's underline it again. The timetable for the unlockdown has been driven by, in part, by the socioeconomic inevitabilities that you point out that there's only so long that people can sustain it in socioeconomic terms and by a political trajectory of management of public relations, if you will, rather than responding to actual ground level pandemic situation. It's also interesting that even now it's a ministry of home that releases all the guidelines. Ministry of Health has disappeared from view. We don't even have the health minister come in on the television screens. And when the prime minister does come, he's seen with peacocks feeding them, or on Red Forb. But we don't really hear him talking about the Mahabharata war against COVID-19. We thought would be over in three weeks. But leaving that out, this is a political criticism of the public relations, leaving it out. What we don't see is any evaluation of what has happened and what we need to do now, except talking about in a very opaque fashion, lockdown and unlockdown phases and saying that now the central government is going to look after districts directly minus the state government even bypassing the state government. Again, a completely stop down centralized law and order approach to the problem. Of course, the emergency act that we have, and we are under the state of emergency because of the Disaster Management Act, which is in operation at the moment. Coming to a more specific issue, since you are in Pune and Pune has emerged as probably the large fastest going numbers of any urban area at the moment. What explains this in Pune? So as I have said repeatedly all these months, there aren't necessarily rational explanations for every event in the chaotic landscape of an epidemic. That said, let's keep what I think of as the class dimension of the epidemic in mind. The epidemic was initiated by the extent of international travel in volume terms, meaning large volume of international travel exchange. This is not to blame one person bringing a disease or anything of this sort. This is simply to point out that infection as a statistical phenomenon would spread from country to country from one original source point with likelihoods that would correlate with the volume of air travel. And the volume of air travel is driven even today by and large by business considerations. So in a certain sense, it is the socioeconomic class category of business travelers who are in a statistical sense, the transmitters across international boundaries. But once you have the virus beginning to spread locally, the local spread depends on a completely different set of socioeconomic conditions. It depends on crowding and not just crowding as in the marketplace, but crowding over a full 24-hour period with housing very close to each other, with crowding within houses, with shared toilet facilities, with extraordinarily narrow lanes, and so on and so forth. Now, if you think about it in those terms, then the largest labour concentration, urban labour concentration, which lives in India in the most crowded hutment colony conditions or tenement colony conditions, what in the Mumbai Pune sector would be called Jhopadpatti, which in Delhi would be called the Chugi Jhopadi residential conditions, or one step above built crowded flats, but with shared toilet facilities that are called the Challs in the Mumbai Pune sector, which are essentially tenement houses. The Mumbai Pune urban conglomerate is the largest urban hutment and tenement colony community in the country connected to the largest international transit point of travel. Which is Mumbai. The extent of crowding is much more in quantitative terms in a variety of parameters than in Delhi. So, for me, it's not surprising that it's over this sector that steady relentless growth, please keep in mind that the relentless growth is also something of an artifact of our political definitions. The virus is still popping up in different small neighbourhoods and dying down and popping up and dying down, but it's all happening within this, what I'm calling, in extremely high density working class communities. That's a very interesting point that you're making. Of course, if you look at the map of Maharashtra, you will see that Mumbai, Pune and Thane in between, of course, are the worst affected. And then you will see the districts which are contiguous to this spreading either up or down from these areas. So, you get a sort of a ink stain with focus in Mumbai, focus in Thane and focus in Pune, which are the urban concentrations. And the general spread of this ink blot equivalent infections. So, you do see this kind of shift that is taking place in the country. But what is worrying at the moment that the Indian spread is now almost in all parts of the country. Maybe numbers are less, maybe numbers are more, but there is no area which is not affected by people who are already confirmed cases. So, almost all areas have confirmed cases and all of them have some core areas from which there, of course, the connections exist within the urban and rural areas and they are spreading. So, therefore, unless we work out something which we have still not done, if we wait for nature to do its part, it's probably going to take years, if ever. So, is vaccines the only answer that we will have in terms of the containment? Otherwise go on like this. So, this is a very, this is a really distressing thing to have to say that we seem to be in a situation where our response as a state, our response as a government or as governments is simply to continue from yesterday despite the fact that the empirical evidence on the ground is that what we were doing yesterday is at the very least not adequate and yet there doesn't seem to be radical rethinking. At least none of us have heard any radical rethinking about what policies and strategies might be thought of a fresh an anew in this matter. I think that is a very depressing situation for us to be in because what that says is that this is how we are going to go on. We are going to go on with the top-down policy in which district administrations are being threatened and blamed by government leadership, by political leadership to ensure that your case numbers are low, to ensure that your deaths are low without an appropriate and adequate injection of resources, without an appropriate and adequate conceptualization of strategies and policies. All that this is going to do is, um, police size as a verb to substitute for militarize, police size the problem more and more and more with the result that we are going to see growing resentment against government responses. We are going to see growing resentment against what will increasingly be seen as distancing measures that apparently have no effect. We are going to see resentment against the inadequate, the manifestly inadequate provision of COVID-19 related medical facilities. In Pune, there are stories on the front pages of the newspapers about patients in dire need for oxygen and for intensive care facilities running from pillar to post to find admissions. We are going to see increasing resentment about this. What we are going to keep getting in response is more and more the government wielding a big stick, apparently ineffectually. And this is going to be a state of emergency that will continue and will be utilized almost perversely as an, let me quote our leadership, as an act of God to rationalize failure of the government on very broad fronts. To rationalize its failures and there are two other things they can of course do, that if for the central government blame the states and also externalize the issue. There of course is, as you know, the Shushant Rajput case, which has become according to television, the most important national issue in the country. And they have discovered that actually in the film industry, young people take marijuana and other drugs. Apparently, they were not aware of it. This is something which was used to them. So this has become the major center of major talking point across the media, huge failure of the media. You don't hear about the failure of the policies, the health policies, what's happening. All this is only coming up in numbers and only in response to what New York Times and others are writing. And still the media is dominated by other news. And of course, you have the border. So, you know, the border news, nationalism, I'm not going to go into that today. But this are good distractions because I doubt that India and China will be foolish enough to get into a border war. But nevertheless, it keeps the pot boiling. And it's also true that there is no hard questions being asked in general about the failure of the government. And let's see this, even Brazil, even the United States, their numbers are falling, India's numbers not. So that is, that's really something which should worry everybody. But I don't see this worry either in the government or in the quote unquote informed circles, which is the first layer of this media. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. And it's interesting that you bring up the contrast between the recent situation of the pandemic in the US and India, and the distinction seems to be on two major fronts. One, as you point out, there are sections of the media in the US by no means all the media, but there are sections of the media in the US, which are doing systematic in depth reporting. And keeping the pandemic in the public eye. And that's sadly helped by the fact that the numbers in the US are so dramatically more even now. But the second issue, which again relates to governmental policies in response to the pandemic, is that there are in the federal structure of the US, there are state governments that have responded quite differently from the responses of the federal government to local control of the pandemic, to outreach for distancing measures, participation in distancing measures, to test provision to contact tracing, those sorts of situations. They're not huge differences. But those small differences, I think accumulate into the current differences between the two countries. We do not seem to have, as yet, with an occasional exception such as Kerala's models, that dramatic is separation between the response of the union government and the response of state governments in part, of course, driven by top-down approaches all around. Yes, I think that's where you also break out the fact that the media, at least in the United States, has turned the light on to the failures of the government. And in our case, that media has played a very, very quote unquote reporting role, but not an investigation, is investigative or a critical role that it is also supposed to play. And particularly give space to those voices. There are there public health experts who are questioning all of that, but their voices are really not percolating. And what seems to come is things which are avoided, deaths, our death numbers are actually lower compared to the number of infections, etc., etc., which we can discuss another day, but essentially, alibis of some kind or the other. Thank you, Satyajit, for being with us as you have been for quite some time now, and we'll come back to you next time probably with looking at the vaccine issue again. Because as we have said here, the only long-term solution that lies now for India, more than even for other countries, is the vaccine without which we don't seem to be able to come out of the crisis we are in. This is all the time we have for NewsClick today. 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