Mukunda Raj Kattel

AS a saying goes, no disaster strikes with a warning. The coronavirus disaster we are facing now had, however, plenty. The first wave it unleashed had already demonstrated the power of its lethality and cruelty. Health experts had warned – drawing on historical precedents, particularly the Spanish flue of 1918 – successive waves were a foregone possibility and would be more disastrous. Before the scientific warnings were heeded, the second wave hit the country resulting in the hue and cry that has shocked and numbed the entire health system, with hospitals and health professionals completely overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. Even the crematoriums are reported to be overwhelmed. Never before did such a tragedy befall the Nepali people and, conditionally hopefully, will never again!

Personal experience
To speak personally, the fear of the coronavirus ravaging the family is over for the time being. All the four of us tested positive, cared for each other and got through it. Our symptoms were mild: moderate fever, nose congestion, eyeball pain and eye irritation, mildly blurry vision, loss of smell and some bit of brain fog. Nothing went abnormal except the fear of ‘what will happen next!’ The fear was, however, excruciating. Television would add to it. The news of the increasing death toll, the plea of health professionals for the supply of oxygen and the stories of family members running from pillar to post to get the cure for their loved ones was too harsh to reckon with and too much to process and come to terms with. As the flow of information about the wreckage of COVID-19 increased, we collectively decided not to watch television.
When a fight is not an option, as they say, it is sensible to pick the alternative choice: flight. So did we. Turning off the television would give some respite from the fear of being one of those into the uncertain battle for life. When my oxygen level dropped briefly to 95 on the fifth day into isolation, none of us spoke a word for two hours, until the pulse oximeter showed 96. Don’t call me alarmist, I am not. But, hospital, ICU and ventilator were the three things we did not want to think of a bit.
A disease unheard of, hence, unnamed, until February 2020 has spread to over 220 countries and territories, sickened some 163 million people and killed some 3.4 million as of May 16. In Nepal, the first coronavirus case was detected on 23 January 2020 and the first death recorded on 14 May 2020. A year on, 447,704 Nepalis have been infected by the virus and 4,856 have succumbed to it. Among those dead is Chandra Chongbang, a childhood friend and schoolmate of mine, a comrade in arms during the days of student politics, the first elected Chairperson of the then Teliya Village Development Committee of Dhankuta, a limitless dreamer and invincible fighter. I lost my dear friend, but Teliya lost her dreamer and leader. Each of the 4,856 dead was a dreamer like Chandra. Each of them was a hope, an aspiration and a future tragically cut short. There was no way to avoid the damage, but it could have been moderated. We failed to rise to the occasion.
We should look back on all this, when we have some free time, draw lessons, both good and bad, and fix the things broken. For the moment, let us do what needs to be done to break the chain of contagion: contact tracing. Unless we are able to trace all patients and isolate them, especially in rural municipalities like Chhathar Jorpati of Dhankuta, where at least three people died in as many days the past week and scores are reportedly confronting the symptoms akin to COVID-19, the plateau of infection that we have seen in the last couple of days will be misleading. Simultaneously, we should work on a war footing to ensure the supply of oxygen, hospital beds, ventilators and other basics that COVID-19 patients need both nationally and locally. Let us not forget that we are talking of the second wave and the possibility of the third and the fourth are real. Complacency and denial exact a cruel price.

Global opportunities

The coronavirus has a global face and force. It has tested the limits of power and privilege over the world, laid bare the costs of the decreasing priority on health research and innovation, and unmasked the chicanery of political populism that either denied the existence of the coronavirus or downplayed its lethality. Global health experts and analysts, such as CNN’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson, argue that had populism not wasted time and energy to invent its own reality to ostracise experts and scientists, the US would not see the calamity under former President Donald Trump, which cost his bid for second presidency, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Jair Bolsonaro the current mayhem in India and Brazil, which are the worst hit countries in the world and ones at risk of producing new COVID variants that, experts worry, may pose a global challenge. If India and Brazil are any guide, populism and coronavirus are inseparable bedfellows.
Behind these huge costs are some silver linings as well. One of them, according to Forbes’s contributor Paul Laudicina, is the possible end of “the political virus” called populism that has infected “one democracy after another” in the world. Once democracy is free of the virus of populism, such as in the US now, it wins the fight against other viruses. Let’s hope this lesson resonates at all levels of the world politics.
Another is the growing realisation that the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines have been unequal, and until everyone is vaccinated in the world no one is safe. Let this realisation evolve into an action that treats COVID-19 as an essential part of the right to health of everyone irrespective of any qualifying barriers. A right creates an obligation on all states, from global to local, to act with urgency, which is what the need of the moment is.
Hoping against hope that things would soon return to normalcy, I would dedicate this piece as a tribute to all the doctors and nurses fighting tooth and nail to protect every life from the COVID-19 monster. These lone fighters deserve to be hailed as the heroes of this century.

(A PhD on human rights and peace, Kattel is a senior research fellow at Policy Research Institute. kattelmr@gmail.com)