If COVID-19 has done one thing, it has exposed the charlatans living among us posing as experts. They don’t get stats, science, data or politics and no matter what they think, speaking or writing proper English is not a skill set. Most of the commentariat love to ask us to stay locked up. These are the same people who are surprised at the lack of deaths due to COVID-19 or that India hasn’t reached 300 million cases.
It’s an indisputable, veritable fact that India’s coronavirus fatality rate is much lower than other nations.
Despite that, the paranoia continues unabated and unchecked. Every day we are attacked on our screens with crazy charts and huge numbers and fatalistic predictions when the media takes a break from the latest gibberish about Sushant Singh Rajput.
Even accounting for unreported deaths, the coronavirus coverage from even mainstream outlets, held in high esteem, has been horrendous.
As Oommen C. Kurian noted in this sublime piece for ORF, ‘zombie statistics and fake analyses were finding legitimacy’, as he eviscerated a piece in The Hindu, whose response was pithily summed up by a Twitter user: “Government didn’t give us numbers, so we made up numbers.”
The bhay ka mahaul is thanks to wall-to-wall coverage, constant updates and every Tom, Dick, and Harry turning upon our screens to warn us. It almost makes one nostalgic for the old-style regional channels which would find the highway to hell or aliens.
Despite the fact that the science is inconclusive, every new study and research was treated like the gospel truth. In that sense, scientists, commentators act with the same dogmatism as their religious counterparts.
If we had breaking news and social media during the Stone Age, we wouldn’t have stepped out of our caves. India’s coronavirus fatality may be lower for numerous reasons.
First, our citizens, particularly those from rural areas are far smarter than we give them credit. After all, they refuse to vote based on op-eds in English newspapers. The democratisation of data means every household can be penetrated and COVID-19 prevention guidelines seem to have hit home.
Secondly, is also substantial evidence to suggest that:
1) Lockdown didn’t prevent the spread of the virus based on SERO tests in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi.
2) India has a lower death rate than Western countries. The coronavirus fatality rates are hugely different. Even accounting for errors, under-reporting and other lacunae in India’s healthcare system, one can surmise that the disease is less deadly here.
This could be due to a variety of reasons including broad-based vaccination, genetic factors, environmental diversity, and food habits.
But we will soon have – or already do have – a larger problem than coronavirus.
The lockdown and the stuttering economy.
No media house, even those who like to speak truth to power, wants to admit that India’s response against coronavirus was horrendous.
Yet, when one points it out, one is deemed insensitive.
You know what’s insensitive?
Not letting people earn so they can fill up their bellies. There are those who earn by the sweat of their brow. India didn’t offer too much to them. But with the lockdown and the refusal to reopen, we’ve taken away their livelihood.
There are people who want to work and those who are willing to offer them work.
But hackneyed rules are making it extremely hard. Corruption has become even rifer, and the license raj era of pre-liberalisation is back. For every task, a palm has to be greased. In fact, it appeared to have brought back the Emergency without actually announcing one. As the erudite advocate Nikhil Mehra noted: “Never before has the State sequestered so much power without declaring an Emergency. It won't relinquish that power so easily.”
It has given infinite power to babus – redolent on salaries and perks from the taxpayers’ money – to decide every single step in society. It has left us in a deep recess.
How many lives have been lost due to the lockdown, due to suicide, due to hunger, due to accidents, due to a reformed license raj?
How many people are wondering where they will get their next meal?
There’s overwhelming evidence that the lockdown didn’t stop anything.
SERO surveys found coronavirus anti-bodies in people with strict lockdowns suggesting they survived but how will we survive this paranoia, where the mind is always full of fear?
We cried when we watched videos of migrants scampering home, in what felt like the world’s largest exodus. They are now coming back to our cities because they have to feed their children.
Whatever the response of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become evidently clear that a severe lockdown hasn’t helped. There are no numbers, and we might never have the numbers, but it’s hard to tell just how bad the response to coronavirus has been compared to coronavirus.
It has let millions jobless; it has left us in penury. Every other day, there are reports of gym trainers or salon workers in distress or taking their lives. Of restaurants shutting down. It's estimated that at least five lakh employees have lost their jobs.
The only solution is to be vigilant but open up.
Thurgood Marshall, the famous American lawyer and civil rights activist had rightly pointed out in a sublime speech that we can’t behave like ostriches.
His speech, slightly paraphrased, could be perfect for India in 2020: “Democracy cannot flourish in fear. We must get to work. We must dissent from the indifferent. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand. We must dissent from a government that has left us without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because India can do better, because we have no choice but to do better.”
Wear a mask, practice social distancing, follow protocols. But for God’s sake stop shaming people who need to go out. Or want to go out. A nation cannot cower in fear forever.
Nirmalya Dutta is the Web Editor of The Free Press Journal. The views expressed are his own.
