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EVERYONE finds comfort in familiarity and when confronted with the possibility that everything in terms of the life we have ever known may never be the same again, it is understandable that some of us feel nervous and agitated, even angry and lost.
Even for an incorrigible news junkie like me with usually diverse interests, there is only one topic to read and write on these days: Covid-19, its impact on the most imperfect of worlds we inhabit and to look at the possibility that we are stepping further and further into the unknown. We are looking at changes in our familiar lifestyles as basic as shaking hands with someone or embracing our loved ones and at another level adapting ourselves to distance or e-learning, working from home and not much travelling, if any.
The aim here is not to be a harbinger of doom and gloom as, simultaneous with social distancing, lockdowns, working and learning from home and no eating out, we also live in an age of incredible scientific discovery.
When our mother was terminally ill with cancer (she died in 1979 aged 48), I remember my elder brother telling me that for him the most painful part was knowing the world was on the threshold of a breakthrough in cancer treatment. It was our tragedy that it would come too late for us. Today, in fact for a number of years now, the type of cancer that took our mother’s life is said to be eminently treatable often with targeted chemotherapy, whilst the few years she survived was with a number of painful surgeries, followed by treatment with horrible, debilitating side effects.
The story of the US, the juggernaut among developed nations, is one of incredible shame.
As we read with considerable unease about the ravages of the pandemic — the global infections and mounting resultant deaths — we can also take a little comfort in researchers in different parts of the world working tirelessly to find effective treatment regimens and most of all a Covid-19 vaccine.
Although experts believe that a vaccine may be 12 to 18 months away, who knows even as I write these lines a scientist somewhere is a moment away from pouring those decisive drops from one test tube into another or a researcher injecting a volunteer with a trial vaccine that will work.
All this is not wishful thinking. From China to the US to UK to Cuba to our very own researchers in Pakistan, the scientific community knows it has to strive at a fierce pace to be able to save lives being lost to the pandemic.
While this is happening, I think the world is also changing fundamentally. Starting with the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, to the 2008 global economic meltdown triggered by the banking industry’s greed, there has been an erosion of the state’s commitment to the governed. The so-called free market, a misnomer by my reckoning as there are far too many distortions for the underlying assumptions of such a model to exist let alone function, has led to the state unapologetically withdrawing from certain key roles only it has the wherewithal to play.
Health is one such area. The public-sector healthcare systems in Europe, for example, have barely managed to survive death by a thousand cuts that mostly conservative governments inflicted on them in the name of austerity as public finances were used to settle private banks’ gambling debts.
Given how it has been subjected to debilitating cuts over the past decade in particular, the once enviable UK National Health Service is in such a shambles that it struggles to provide even personal protective equipment to front-line healthcare staff. The infections/death toll among such healthcare staff not just in UK but in Italy and Spain as well is a testament to the courage and dedication with which they have attended to their critically ill patients even if it has meant jeopardising their own personal safety when they did not have proper PPE.
The story of the US, the juggernaut among developed nations, is one of incredible shame. The US, undoubtedly, remains at the cutting edge of scientific development and discovery and may even boast some of the best medical centres in the world.
And yet a large chunk of its population does not have access to even basic healthcare as it is market driven and the state provides next to nothing. This may be an oversimplification but if you lose your job you basically lose your health insurance that comes with the job. Since the pandemic started, some 5.2 million Americans have lost their jobs (filed for unemployment benefits) and if that number is added to the 27.5m without health insurance before the Covid-19 crisis, the state of affairs isn’t hard to imagine.
The US prides itself on being a ‘land of opportunity’ where anyone can become a success story but in a country which boasts over 600 billionaires (according to forbes.com) and is one of the most powerful and wealthiest in the world, the bottom 10 per cent have no health insurance. Buried among the statistics of the Covid-19 deaths is the reality of how unequal is that opportunity. In New York alone, a disproportionately large number (as against their share in the population) of ethnic minorities whether Hispanic or African American/Asian have perished.
This is not a rant against capitalism of the sort that is being practised in the West today but merely a suggestion that if wealth creation is your society’s desired objective, your economies will have to perform. And they cannot during public health scares. The collective health of societies will have to see more commitment by the state than it has received over the past three decades in general and over the past 10 years in particular. Or threats such as Covid-19 will continue to imperil wealth creation, what to talk of the impact on the poor and the upheaval that can follow.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2020
