Dear all. Thanks for all the feedback (on and off twitter).
To reiterate somethings. As mentioned in the article, every life lost is too many, and we must hold the central (and state) governments responsible for any lapses shown. I share the grief and shock of those who have...
To reiterate somethings. As mentioned in the article, every life lost is too many, and we must hold the central (and state) governments responsible for any lapses shown. I share the grief and shock of those who have...
https://twitter.com/SimnaniIqbals/status/1388692512160849922
..lost their lives. I have been myself been on twitter helping wherever possible help people find oxygen, beds, ICU via Apps or other volunteers kind enough to help. I have friends who have lost near and dear ones. I know the situation is very heart breaking. I share your...
...sorrow. As I clearly mentioned in the article, having religious and election gatherings during a pandemic may have contributed too to the Covid surge. I wrote the article to counter some lazy thinking and oversimplifications being propagated. A wrong message was being given...
...given that India's response to Covid was wrong from the beginning and based on that another narrative was built that since the response to first phase was wrong, the destruction of the second phase was a forgone conclusion. This is factually incorrect. India's response to...
...first phase was much better then the global average and was endorsed by none other than Bill Gates (among others). We started off with a very ambitious vaccine program. However as cases began to subside, and the second wave started to hit different parts of the world...
...at different periods in time and with different intensity, at a crucial period India's cases started to go down dramatically. Given these conditions, there were less incentives ( and the pressure of economy) for more stricter controls and there were hints from scientific...
..community that the virus was so widespread in India anyway due to its high population density, the government seems to have gone into a false sense of security. At same time there were no 'credible' pointers of the emergence of deadly new strains in India spreading ( our...
...genome sequencing has been weak traditionally). Though the opposition and some media commentators are now attacking the government in showing laxity, in the absence of any concrete pointers, government would not have been able to build a consensus on a lockdown. The same....
...lack of any credible pointers led the state to believe (suing the last wave as reference) that there may not be be such an exceptional demand of oxygen even if there was one more wave. As usual sure one can rightly argue that the feedback loop between those who were...
...monitoring the data and feeding it to the decision makers to make decision on was weak, but that is a general gap in our governance model and we surely to ask questions there. But again since there was no precedent for such a thing, the people who were in-charge of...
...evaluating this data did not know how to draw predictive inferences into the future from this data. One can argue on both sides that we should have had such a team in place, but we have lots of historical weaknesses in our governance processes, which is unrealistic to...
...expect that these would have magically get fixed in a short period where the cases started go from low to very high ( 3 weeks or more). One thing is clear, from all this we can surely say there was a case of improving processes on the fly, but there is no convincing case...
...at all that there was a clear data set based on which one could unambiguously plan ahead. So the premise that government's Covid policy was bad from the start and hence the reason why we were unprepared for the severe second wave is not correct. But this myth was being...
...repeatedly being pushed like in an echo chamber. I felt compelled to call this out as it prevents a debate on the actual deep systematic governance gap which though not the creation of the current government, but it should have more aggressively tries to address it. Plus...
...many commentators surely were not interested in restricting the debate to pandemic management, but mixing it with India's secular versus Hindu Renaissance / Hindutva debate - latter is a valid debate and needs to be held its proper time. But by mixing the Pandemic...
...management debate with other topics, this just polarises the debate and prevents different groups working together to face the deadly second wave. This was done deliberately by some commentators to draw political mileage out of a tragedy which would have made handling of...
...the crisis even more difficult. I found it important enough to call out some of these commentators for their lazy thinking (charitably) and opportunism to mix unrelated issues to exploit a tragedy. 🙏
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
