THERE are times in the life of any government when it is faced with a crisis of such mammoth proportions that it becomes the signature event defining that government’s legacy. We can think of the earthquake of 2005 or the floods of 2010 as examples.

The Musharraf regime, for all the criticism that has been levelled at it for its failings, provided a swift and decisive response to the earthquake. It took a couple of days for the magnitude of the damage to sink in, but once the true scale of the disaster was known, Musharraf was in firm command at the head of the government and directed the response in a way that even his harshest critics (and I count myself among them) will admit was admirable.

People took the lead provided by him and ventured into the affected areas with relief supplies in large numbers, and the country pulled itself together as one behind him for those days and worked to help its brethren in the affected areas get back on their feet. No doubt one could find all sorts of faults with what was done in those days, but it cannot be denied that the affected areas were back on their feet within a period of a few years at most.

The floods of 2010 provide a contrast. One searing image from those days is the picture of the helicopter carrying then president Asif Zardari landing at his estate in northern France as the floodwaters devastated the country. When you have a moment, just google Pakistan flood and look at the images to rekindle the memories. The government was skewered for its casual ‘let them eat cake’ sort of response, and in subsequent years when flooding returned the president made sure he was seen on the front line in every case.

We must break the chains of transmission and then hunt down the virus.

Between these two extremes, where is Imran Khan going to be placed? What we are facing now is at least as big a disaster as either of those two events. There is no telling yet how far this will go. At the moment, all we know with certainty is that the number of people infected with the coronavirus is far higher than what government data would have us believe, simply because the number of tests carried out is pathetically low and the screening criteria to determine who is eligible for a test are very stringent and do not include those who show symptoms but have no travel history. This means cases of secondary infection are most likely not showing up in official data.

As of the end of day on Tuesday, the Ministry of Health’s Daily Situation Report showed that 1,621 tests had been performed of which 241 were positive. If these were 16,210 tests, how much do you want to bet that the number of those testing positive would be 2,410? Of all these tests 606 were carried out in Sindh and another 627 in Islamabad. By end of day on Tuesday, Punjab had tested 133 people only. At least that’s what the official data is showing, and even in the data there are problems because on some occasions the tallies given by the federal authorities are different from the ones being put out by the provinces. So we know they’re having trouble keeping tabs on the data, but if we take it at face value then the number of tests being carried out is far too low.

The government is falling back on the argument that this is an intractable problem and even advanced economies are having a tough time dealing with it, and that there is no known cure. That may be true but is hardly reassuring to hear from one’s own top authorities who seem more driven to defend their actions and bicker with the opposition than to work together to fashion a strong, far-reaching response.

Even in his national address, which was weak to the point of debilitation, the prime minister managed praise for the government of Balochistan but said nothing about Sindh that has organised the most robust response to the growing danger than anybody else in the federation. The omission reveals a pettiness of mind, and an inability to put politics and personal feelings aside at a time of extreme peril.

Lockdowns carry a grave cost in our country where the vast majority does not have the means to buy supplies to carry them for weeks on end, nor do they have the space in which to isolate members of their families at home who might be infected. People live crammed 10 to a room in many working class localities in Karachi and putting them in lockdown and expecting that they will isolate those who might show symptoms is ridiculous.

Yet we must break the chains of transmission and then hunt down the virus —one infected person at a time — because there is no other way to win this fight. That is why the state is needed urgently at this time, because the effort will take massive quarantine centres coupled with ramped-up testing. And those quarantine centres need to be managed far better than the one in Taftan because there a resource-starved provincial government was left to its own devices to manage an influx of almost 6,000 people from the neighbouring country in the midst of an outbreak.

The government of Balochistan says it was abandoned by the federal government once the returnees began to arrive, since it was the federal authorities who had promised to set up a testing facility in Quetta which never materialised.

Let’s hope the leadership is up to the job.

The writer is a member of staff.

khurram.husain@gmail.com

Twitter: @khurramhusain

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2020