Love in the Time of Corona
Yesterday one of my favourite nieces was celebrating her birthday. With a heavy heart I refused to pay her a visit. The reason? Covid-19.
I wasn’t sick, nor were my relatives. We were all planning to travel in our personal vehicles and assemble at my niece’s home. The interaction wasn’t expected to stretch beyond an hour or two. So was I being cautious, paranoid or plain absurd?
Governments across the globe have, by and large, responded swiftly and efficiently to the threat. With health advisories (like WHO’s infographic video, Kerala’s Break the Chain, Vietnam’s viral Jealous Corona) and regular updates from news agencies abounding, there is hardly a deficit of information on how to keep ourselves safe. Celebrities, vloggers and even the general public have pitched in, sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results!
The need to keep our hands clean has been driven home by ominous caller tunes (I have taken to washing my hands like Lady Macbeth, furiously muttering the happy birthday chant — my own version of Go Corona!). Our elbows and kerchiefs are as combat-ready as ever to arrest an unexpected sneeze. And we keep away from the sick by all means. #SocialDistancing. For most of us, that also includes staying away from others if we feel unwell ourselves. But none of these apply to my situation. How would interactions between a group of healthy people contribute to an epidemic?!
While social distancing definitely means minimizing contact with people to limit the spread of a disease, somewhere down the lane we seem to have missed a crucial point.
Covid-19 often manifests as a serious condition only in the elderly or in people with other serious health conditions. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the populace will be spared; just that a majority, consisting of the young and otherwise-healthy, may not develop any discernable (let alone definitive) symptoms at all. Reports point that such cases may go undetected or unreported. Yet, they may play a crucial role in the transmission of this infection…
In a young and busy country such as ours where everyone is caught up in a struggle to make ends meet, an itchy throat is often ignored, a cough or sneeze gets passed off for a dust allergy and hardly any attention is paid to a mild fever that gets cured with a pill or two. With our limited resources we simply are not in a position to hunt down each mild-to-moderate case, test it for Covid-19 and impose mass quarantine, either.
There is definitely no need to panic. But during this time of vigil, isn’t it really up to each of us to ensure that we don’t unintentionally trigger a chain of infections that may overwhelm our healthcare system? By not following the social distancing protocol, we may not hurt ourselves directly. But we may accidentally pass on the virus to someone (albeit through secondary or tertiary levels of transmission) who may not have the health or the finances to battle the disease — an elderly family member, a domestic help, a lift operator, a shop keeper, or a stranger that we may not even remember meeting. Do we really want to scuttle the round-the-clock efforts made by our government and health care workers in curbing the spread of the disease or worse, risk the life of another for our fleeting joys? Suddenly, going for that all-important religious function, family outing or close-friends’ gathering doesn’t seem all that unavoidable, does it?
Let the love for our dear ones extend to embrace our communities as well. And let that love save the humanity in these troubled times.
#CoronaVirus #Covid19 #Pandemic #Awareness #BreakTheChain #SocialDistancing #FlattenTheCurve #StayAtHome #DoYourPart
