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Business News/ Opinion / Views/  Opinion | A collaborative world will be safer and more equitable
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Opinion | A collaborative world will be safer and more equitable

A lot is still not known about covid and we must adapt to changing circumstances to deal with it

Photo: BloombergPremium
Photo: Bloomberg

Post 9/11 and Mumbai’s 26/11, we realized that terror did not require battlefields or armies, and learnt to fight a new kind of terror. After the 2008 financial crisis, we figured out how to emerge from financial apocalypse. However, the worst was yet to come.

With 2020 arrived a new decade, full of the promise of great scientific progress and prosperity. Instead, it brought a pandemic that could kill at will and put a spanner in our economic generators, pushing millions into poverty and sending businesses into free fall.

Covid-19 has sent the world into a shutdown. While some of us are working relentlessly to find a cure and a vaccine, the immediate need is to tame the virus through social distancing and lockdowns, and to treat patients as swiftly as possible.

India has faced a Hobson’s choice. While some may argue that India was too swift and harsh in announcing a five-week lockdown, there is no doubt here that lives trumped livelihoods. True, the difficulties of millions of migrant workers and economic disruptions filled our newsfeed, giving rise to outrage. But governments, both Central and state, have come to the rescue with different initiatives to safeguard lives and livelihoods.

The destruction of demand could be huge. Given the economy’s structure, with 83% of all workers self-employed or part of India’s informal workforce, with no job contracts, it has taken an unprecedented hit. An unemployment rate of around 8% in March had shot up to over 23% by the first week of April, with 50 million jobs lost. This number will likely increase to 100 million in the coming weeks. Another 125 million farmers need support to harvest crops and get better price realizations. Supporting weaker segments of the population will require huge handouts. While an educated workforce can help India rebound, a single solution alone will not work, nor will a big bang package.

India may need to start again from scratch in some ways. Government support, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US for social security and infrastructure, a generous financial package for companies—especially micro, small and medium enterprises—to survive, liquidity injections for large manufacturers and service providers, and investment in education, healthcare and innovation are the needs of the hour. The future may be distant, but the “harvest" could be potentially large if we restart quickly. An advantage is that India remains an attractive investment destination for the world.

In facing the covid challenge, a large part of the battle is lack of knowledge and a fear of the unknown. In India’s case, the speculation on our current low eruption rate is that it is because of our hot weather and past immunity. However, is there any scientific evidence that the virus is unstable at high temperatures or that our being inoculated by the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine gives an advantage? Is there a clear benefit in testing millions of Indians, even if it were economically and physically possible?

Without clear scientific knowledge, we can only learn from the little evidence we have, and evolve, like the virus. That is like the field of medicine in many ways, adaptive and prescriptive. So we will lock down, test and open up specific areas for the next three months at least, till new solutions emerge. Just as we share our pharmaceuticals with the world, India too should get access to new cures and treatment modalities.

India’s healthcare community can be said to have risen to the challenge. On the one hand, we saw fewer patients visiting hospitals, as the lockdown made travel difficult and elective procedures got cancelled. On the other, we saw the need to ring-fence the most vulnerable, the immuno-compromised, and others with co-morbidities. At our group of hospitals, we took a four-step approach that involved a digital risk scan, which over 13 million people have used through a 24-hour free hotline manned by 100 doctors. We kept our network of pharmacies active, created isolation rooms in partnership with hotels for non-critical patients, and, for the final ring, converted several hospitals into dedicated covid facilities, especially for acute cases.Tens of thousands of health workers have risked their safety. The economic reality of keeping hospitals safe and running in the face of liquidity challenges is a worry too, and this would also have to be addressed.

Covid-19 has changed the world in many ways. In medicine, it has established the legitimacy of digital health, the adoption of which has been faster than the spread of the virus. Telemedicine has offered a win-win way for doctors to connect with patients safely and people to connect with a doctor without venturing out. Eventually, digital health has the potential of diagnosing illnesses quicker and cheaper, and also on a large scale. It will also increase compliance through surveillance, thanks to artificial intelligence and connected devices.

Medicine will evolve much faster in the post-covid world, with firms like Apple, Google, Samsung and Tencent entering the field. Healthcare is no longer the exclusive realm of doctors and hospitals. The harnessing of technology will see boundaries being stretched to keep us better prepared for a pandemic like this one. Ultimately, it is our “sisu", which in Finnish means extraordinary courage in the face of adversity, that will enable us to transform barriers into frontiers and make the world more collaborative, safer and more equitable.

Shobana Kamineni is executive vice-chairperson, Apollo Hospitals Group, and former president, Confederation of Indian Industry

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Published: 28 Apr 2020, 10:59 PM IST
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