Fragility of life in the 21st century

It is strange how we take our life for granted and make plans for weeks and months ahead as if we will continue to roll on during that time just as we are doing today.  I got another lesson why I should not do that, last week. It was a cold starting on Sunday the 9^th Feb. It took its usual course of four days and thoroughly messed up my plans for these four days. What if it had been a flu? Well, it would have been worse. Whatever I read seemed only to say it would have been more severe than a cold, but otherwise more of the same. The one distinguishing mark might have been that flu would have had a fever associated with it. 

Well, what if I had gone to one of those conferences in one of those exotic countries/regions? I could have been accidentally caught up in one of those “plagues” of modern times, an acute respiratory illness, like Covid-19, also known as the corona virus disease. The one difference would have been the quarantine! An exotic land would suddenly turn into a frightening dystopia where one would have to play the 3:97 dice game with death, in isolation. What does that mean? Everyone is cagey with numbers, but the mortality rate among Covid-19 patients seems to be 3%. It seems absurd to hear when sane doctors tell you, “Well! We have confirmed to you that you have it. Unfortunately, if you insist on knowing it, the mortality rate is 3%”. Consolation, it doesn’t sound as bad as the death rate! Unless, you have the pesky patient’s habit of looking it up on the web. You don’t even need to know that a thesaurus lists synonyms of words. You need not know anything more to type “mortality death” into the box on Google!

Well, that is a fact of life. Life is as fragile as that: 97:3, 99:1, or 99.5:0.5 sometimes, week after week. It is always a dice game. sometimes safer, sometimes not. A fellow passenger wearing a mask, on the next seat on the plane. Sometimes it is the engine problem you had read about, on that model of plane! It is sometimes those VIP kids in their crorepati cars! I now know who a human being is! He/she knows a few dozen facts of life like this, but keeps going all the same, week after week!

लगे रहो, इनसान!

Incidentally, every pandemic is a chain reaction. In a nuclear weapon, an exploding atom causes one or more other atoms to explode. The result is a rapid release of an enormous amount of energy as a whole lot of atoms explode in a very short time. For a pandemic to continue spreading, all that is needed is for one case to trigger one or more cases in turn. As population densities increase and airlines carry millions of people around, pandemics are inevitable. New forms of healthcare preparedness are necessary. Major hospitals proudly announce that they are ready with a 30-bed isolation ward! What do they plan to do if a pandemic reaches 300 cases a day in that city? We need a national task force to prepare a plan for coping with all eventualities and to monitor the progress of the disease in India. This task force need not even meet; it can do its job over the Internet and submit its report in a week followed by weekly updates. If the Chinese can build a hospital in ten days, can’t we organize a task force in ten days? Can’t we announce an emergency fund to fight the disease and review its size regularly in consultation with the task force?

Srinivasan Ramani