The tragedy in India


For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed? 

Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can attest is a very small place to house millions of pilgrims).  Now, of course, the real cost of this attitude has become apparent.

Again, does Modi remind you of another "leader" who never really believed that Covid posed a threat, and went out of his way not to do anything that would make it appear he was concerned about it? I can't remember that guy's name, though. I've repressed it.

P.S. As if on cue, WaPo ran a great opinion piece on Modi today, pointing out that it was his reckless decisions that led to this crisis. They may have been good politics for Modi, but they were deadly for the Indian people. The piece also mentions that Modi never listens to experts, but goes ahead and acts on hunches that then prove disastrous - like his initial Covid lockdown and like when he invalidated most of the currency a few years ago, thinking he'd eliminate corruption that way (spoiler alert: He didn't eliminate corruption! Hard to believe, I know...)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356 th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog ) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here. I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later: Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as pos
Read more

It’s all about health care

Over the weekend, there were two momentous events in Washington that will undoubtedly have a seriously negative effect on the health (or lack thereof) of the American people. However, just one of these events on its surface seems to be about healthcare. In this post, I will discuss the one that doesn’t seem to be about healthcare, but actually is. Barring some unforeseen development before then, in my next post I’ll discuss the other event. The former event was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and Mitch McConnell’s immediate (i.e. about 1 ½ hours after her passing was announced) announcement that he would push through Trump’s nominee before the election – assuming four Republican Senators don’t block that process. Why is this event about healthcare? Because the Supreme Court is set to decide in December a case that would literally overturn Obamacare and cause more than 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage in the middle of a pandemic.   The case is based on a ridi
Read more

An up-close look at a hospital breaking under the Omicron load

This opinion piece in WaPo today provides a horrifying perspective by an ER doctor on the situation in her ER on a “typical” day of the omicron wave. It shows very clearly that lack of beds is just the beginning of the problem. The lack of staff at all levels – EMTs through nurses through physicians – is really hurting, but even worse, it’s leading to more burnout among the existing staff, which of course is making the staffing shortage worse, which of course is increasing burnout…lather, rinse, repeat. I have two ideas for Joe Biden: First, turn Build Back Better into another Covid relief bill, this one focused entirely on building back the hospital staff (and infrastructure, although that’s not the main problem) that we need to handle what – as the author points out – will undoubtedly be an overload of the system for a long time to come. This is both because we’re almost certainly not finished with Covid, even when the omicron wave subsides, but because there is a big backlog
Read more