Read this thread.
This had to be said because we have too many “uneducated literates”
in this country.
It’s important to see the data, appreciate the context and think about the available options without the benefit of hindsight.
India had done a pretty decent job so far.
What @oommen explicitly didn’t say:
In Jan-Feb, the babus must have had a tough time figuring out what’s going on. WHO was saying one thing. The Embassy in China, Vietnam, etc was hearing something else.
The administration had earlier experience with SARS(again a chinese virus).
At that time, we figured out that WHO can’t be trusted.
Countries like India don’t have the bandwidth or the resources like WHO. And we had to do the whole heavy lifting. As more information started trickling in, we were getting better prepared.
But we still had several issues
Despite giving states adequate warning during the lockdown 1, not a single state actually built any extra medical facility anticipating the future demand. Even after railways nudged by building mobile covid centres, there were no takers for the facility nor new hospitals.
What we saw was states trying to use this lackadaisically as another opportunity to extract more funds from the centre.
One of the early stumbling blocks presented by states: they wanted centre to do everything including conduct and funding of tests.
The reason states were trying to put everything on the centre:
Every state knew that their resources are very limited. Even the state with the best medical infrastructure too knew that they don’t have the capacity as per 3-month projections.
India’s problem has always been about scale.
And we don’t have resources.
Politics dictates that all resources can’t be deployed on all the things that had to be done.
Many states eventually added facilities.
The deep distrust of everything private ensured that we didn’t tap our private resources. When we were forced to use that, things were already spiraling out of control.
On top of that, we were facing the regular challenges like floods, cyclone, etc. We even had earthquakes.
Despite all these things, the health and home officials did a pretty good job.
The number of active cases peeked at about 10 lakhs, and has started coming down now.
@oommen
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