On March 24th, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the few heads of government who had announced a stringent nationwide lockdown, for 21 straight days. At a time when India was seething with anger at China for its aggression along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), Modi took the decision to direct Indian consulates in China to approach factories that produce RT-PCR kits and load them on aircraft specially dispatched from New Delhi. Over the next several weeks, the prime minister followed a punishing schedule of considered decision-making, determined to win the battle against the spread of Covid-19. It was past midnight sometime in August when he chanced upon a report that showed the rising incidence of influenza-like cases in a remote district of Tripura. Modi dialled Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb in Agartala, without any hesitation about the late hour, and directed him to collect information urgently, hold a meeting with his administration and get back to him (Modi) with a detailed action-planned report by the next afternoon. Modi was relieved when the report that reached him the next day noted that the incidence of flu in the specified area was not uncommon during that time of the year. Deb added that efforts were being made on a war-footing by the local administration to contain its spread. That is a hectic pace that Modi has kept up through the many weeks of lockdown and the unwavering battle against the spread of the coronavirus and its fatalities.
There’s an interesting public health study published by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on ‘Lessons learned from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota’ that resonates, at multiple levels, with the measures taken by the Modi Government in the wake of the Covid pandemic, the biggest in a century. The study outlines in detail the struggles faced by civilians with timely but controversial decisions on public lockdown and mandatory mask usage imposed by medical health experts in both towns to pummel the spread and fatalities. Of particular concern was the reluctance to report infections due to imposed isolation and the larger inclination to focus on positive news during the sensitive time of war. As with Covid infections, there were many unknowns that both the civil administration and the medical fraternity had to battle. With comparatively limited progress in science, there were many imponderables—they believed it was a bacterial outbreak, for starters—to deal with urgently. And city administrators rose heroically and firmly to the task. The Spanish Flu (February 1918 to April 1920) killed more than 50 million people worldwide.
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