Umer Farooq writes about Punjab's young doctors refusal to treat coronavirus patients due to lack of protective gear and says we need to realise that they are as human as anybody else. Instead of criticising the doctors, we should ask the government why protective gears are not available at the hospitals.
Young doctors in Lahore who are working in Out Patient Departments (OPDs) at Mayo Hospital have reportedly gone on a strike citing the reason of lack of availability of protective gears. The doctors have called on the government to provide them protective kits so they can perform their duties without the risk of contracting coronavirus.
Many on social media labeled this as lack of sense of duty among the young doctors and deplored this as moral degeneration in our society, without pausing for a movement to realise that doctors are as human as anybody else could be. Absence of fear of contracting infection and absence of fear of death in humans is only possible if he or she is of insane mind. Any normal person will fear death and he or she will fear getting infected by the deadly virus.
So the young doctors' refusal to work without protective gears indicate something else—this something else is also most glaringly and visibly obvious from other indicators that have surfaced in our society since the arrival of COVID-19 generated pandemic at the gates of Pakistan—we are absolutely without resources and capacity to deal with such a pandemic on a scale that would reach an immensely large proportion within next one month.
There is a fear visible on the faces of managers of large public hospitals across Pakistan that if this virus becomes rampantly common in the society there will be a mad rush towards government hospitals for getting some kind of medical relief and these government hospitals are absolutely without any capacity to deal with incoming patients in such a situation. Rather the government hospitals would become so overcrowded that their routine capacity to treat patients suffering from routine diseases will drastically diminish.
There is a possibility of anarchy and chaos in the public hospitals—doctors therefore, at the private level—are advising common man in the society to keep away from the hospitals in case they develop Coronavrus like symptoms. Doctors—perhaps the whole medical staff in the hospitals—in fact are pitiable individuals in an environment, which is fast becoming danger in itself.
Doctors without protective gears, doctors without resources and doctors with low pay and low social status are not the answer to deal with a medical emergency like Coronavirus. Simply don’t expect them to serve according to the expectations in such a situation.
Is there any other department or service in Pakistan’s state machinery that could be expected to deal with this medical emergency? The answer is an outright no. The other day I read a hilarious statement that Pakistani Armed Forces have been put on high alert to deal with the threat of Corona Virus—Weapons don’t kill viruses. They kill humans.
We desperately need a service a force, which can protect the army and other forces themselves from the outbreak of the pandemic in the ranks and files of the Armed Forces.
This is a pandemic, which is global in nature and it is posing a new kind of threat for human civilisation—a threat, which requires new kinds of tools with which to deal with it in an effective manner. At the social level, we are about to redefine the meaning of accident for the dictionaries that human civilisations have so far produced—a sneeze or a cough in public could be an accident, as threatening to human life as head on collision between a two vehicles coming from the opposite direction—in popular understanding.
Initially international health organisations were telling us that the COVID-19 virus doesn’t remain suspended in the air so therefore there was no danger of anyone contracting the virus through respiration from the air.
Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the US National Institutes of Health, say that their tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours. So potentially, we have a situation, where the virus is expected to remain in the air, in places of our daily visitation, if the pandemic spreads in our society.
Without going into scientific details released by different international health organisations—which could be much difficult to make sense of—let me make the point that this is a new kind of problem that has surfaced as a threat to human civilisation all across the globe. Human interaction provides the foundations to human civilisation and this pandemic strikes at this very foundation.
The problem with Pakistan is that we are uniquely ill-prepared and without capacity to deal with the threat. Our public discourse is restricted to deal with the threats that emanate from human sources and rival human societies. Our literature, our politics, our media and our religious tracts are simply devoid of any mention of non-conventional threats like Coronavirus.
The westerns are a bit more imaginative in this regard—their literatures, their feature movies, documentaries, religious discourse is full of imaginative situations where they have to deal with unconventional threats, which can erode the very basis of human civilisation as we know it.
It is hilarious to watch the loud and thumping advertisements of military produced feature dramas on private news channels, depicting fully equipped military men, with protective gears, pounding on conventional enemies, while the nation lives in the fear of a tiny virus that is simply beyond human perception. Can the resource allocation, we do in our annual budget, be justified in the face of a threat like Coronavirus considering that we spend so little on coronavirus every year? Can the huge structures we have built with enormous resources over the years could have a justification for their continued existence, in face of a threat that can devour millions. Our priorities have brought us to a point where our state will be a silent spectator to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our countrymen—if the pandemic runs its normal course. This can only be prevented if possibly a foreign friendly country could come to our rescue with some financial aid. But remember financial aid at this stage will not be enough.
We don’t have the capacity to treat Coronavirus patients on such a large scale—we need trained doctors, we need protective gears and we need motivation, which is missing.
Perhaps because right now our forty private television screens are running countless songs to motivate our military men, at lest two feature drama to depict the lives of our brave soldiers, which are there at the borders to deal with the threat that is primarily perceived by some military men sitting in GHQ and then this sense of threat is disseminated to the society through different media outlets.
There is not a single minute devoted on Pakistani television screens to understanding the unconventional threats that are lurking on the horizon and that could not be wished away just like that.
Our misplaced priorities could be judged from the fact that on the one hand our doctors don’t have the protective gears to treat the Coronavirus patients at public hospitals, while on the other hand Pakistan is ranked as the eleventh largest arms importer in the world, according to a report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) in March 2020. Arms and weapons, no matter how modern they are, cannot protect us from unconventional threats like pollution, climatic changes, urban insurgency, cross border crime rings (weapons can only partially solve the problem in the last two cases).
In such a pessimists environment, religion sometimes provide solace to the mankind—but look at the way our extremely insensitive clergy has responded to this situation. There is a Lahore based religious cleric, who announced a religious public gathering and claimed that nobody would contract coronavirus in this gathering, “I promise” he said. There is a pressure on the government not to ban the Friday prayers. On the other hand public health experts are warning that Friday prayers could become the source of the spread of the pandemic. The decisions we will make as individuals, families, communities and nations will decide the direction and spread of this pandemic. Please realise the enormity of the situation. Social isolation for the time being is the only solution.
Young doctors in Lahore who are working in Out Patient Departments (OPDs) at Mayo Hospital have reportedly gone on a strike citing the reason of lack of availability of protective gears. The doctors have called on the government to provide them protective kits so they can perform their duties without the risk of contracting coronavirus.
Many on social media labeled this as lack of sense of duty among the young doctors and deplored this as moral degeneration in our society, without pausing for a movement to realise that doctors are as human as anybody else could be. Absence of fear of contracting infection and absence of fear of death in humans is only possible if he or she is of insane mind. Any normal person will fear death and he or she will fear getting infected by the deadly virus.
So the young doctors' refusal to work without protective gears indicate something else—this something else is also most glaringly and visibly obvious from other indicators that have surfaced in our society since the arrival of COVID-19 generated pandemic at the gates of Pakistan—we are absolutely without resources and capacity to deal with such a pandemic on a scale that would reach an immensely large proportion within next one month.
There is a fear visible on the faces of managers of large public hospitals across Pakistan that if this virus becomes rampantly common in the society there will be a mad rush towards government hospitals for getting some kind of medical relief and these government hospitals are absolutely without any capacity to deal with incoming patients in such a situation. Rather the government hospitals would become so overcrowded that their routine capacity to treat patients suffering from routine diseases will drastically diminish.
There is a possibility of anarchy and chaos in the public hospitals—doctors therefore, at the private level—are advising common man in the society to keep away from the hospitals in case they develop Coronavrus like symptoms. Doctors—perhaps the whole medical staff in the hospitals—in fact are pitiable individuals in an environment, which is fast becoming danger in itself.
Doctors without protective gears, doctors without resources and doctors with low pay and low social status are not the answer to deal with a medical emergency like Coronavirus. Simply don’t expect them to serve according to the expectations in such a situation.
Is there any other department or service in Pakistan’s state machinery that could be expected to deal with this medical emergency? The answer is an outright no. The other day I read a hilarious statement that Pakistani Armed Forces have been put on high alert to deal with the threat of Corona Virus—Weapons don’t kill viruses. They kill humans.
We desperately need a service a force, which can protect the army and other forces themselves from the outbreak of the pandemic in the ranks and files of the Armed Forces.
This is a pandemic, which is global in nature and it is posing a new kind of threat for human civilisation—a threat, which requires new kinds of tools with which to deal with it in an effective manner. At the social level, we are about to redefine the meaning of accident for the dictionaries that human civilisations have so far produced—a sneeze or a cough in public could be an accident, as threatening to human life as head on collision between a two vehicles coming from the opposite direction—in popular understanding.
Initially international health organisations were telling us that the COVID-19 virus doesn’t remain suspended in the air so therefore there was no danger of anyone contracting the virus through respiration from the air.
Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the US National Institutes of Health, say that their tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours. So potentially, we have a situation, where the virus is expected to remain in the air, in places of our daily visitation, if the pandemic spreads in our society.
Without going into scientific details released by different international health organisations—which could be much difficult to make sense of—let me make the point that this is a new kind of problem that has surfaced as a threat to human civilisation all across the globe. Human interaction provides the foundations to human civilisation and this pandemic strikes at this very foundation.
The problem with Pakistan is that we are uniquely ill-prepared and without capacity to deal with the threat. Our public discourse is restricted to deal with the threats that emanate from human sources and rival human societies. Our literature, our politics, our media and our religious tracts are simply devoid of any mention of non-conventional threats like Coronavirus.
The westerns are a bit more imaginative in this regard—their literatures, their feature movies, documentaries, religious discourse is full of imaginative situations where they have to deal with unconventional threats, which can erode the very basis of human civilisation as we know it.
It is hilarious to watch the loud and thumping advertisements of military produced feature dramas on private news channels, depicting fully equipped military men, with protective gears, pounding on conventional enemies, while the nation lives in the fear of a tiny virus that is simply beyond human perception. Can the resource allocation, we do in our annual budget, be justified in the face of a threat like Coronavirus considering that we spend so little on coronavirus every year? Can the huge structures we have built with enormous resources over the years could have a justification for their continued existence, in face of a threat that can devour millions. Our priorities have brought us to a point where our state will be a silent spectator to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our countrymen—if the pandemic runs its normal course. This can only be prevented if possibly a foreign friendly country could come to our rescue with some financial aid. But remember financial aid at this stage will not be enough.
We don’t have the capacity to treat Coronavirus patients on such a large scale—we need trained doctors, we need protective gears and we need motivation, which is missing.
Perhaps because right now our forty private television screens are running countless songs to motivate our military men, at lest two feature drama to depict the lives of our brave soldiers, which are there at the borders to deal with the threat that is primarily perceived by some military men sitting in GHQ and then this sense of threat is disseminated to the society through different media outlets.
There is not a single minute devoted on Pakistani television screens to understanding the unconventional threats that are lurking on the horizon and that could not be wished away just like that.
Our misplaced priorities could be judged from the fact that on the one hand our doctors don’t have the protective gears to treat the Coronavirus patients at public hospitals, while on the other hand Pakistan is ranked as the eleventh largest arms importer in the world, according to a report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) in March 2020. Arms and weapons, no matter how modern they are, cannot protect us from unconventional threats like pollution, climatic changes, urban insurgency, cross border crime rings (weapons can only partially solve the problem in the last two cases).
In such a pessimists environment, religion sometimes provide solace to the mankind—but look at the way our extremely insensitive clergy has responded to this situation. There is a Lahore based religious cleric, who announced a religious public gathering and claimed that nobody would contract coronavirus in this gathering, “I promise” he said. There is a pressure on the government not to ban the Friday prayers. On the other hand public health experts are warning that Friday prayers could become the source of the spread of the pandemic. The decisions we will make as individuals, families, communities and nations will decide the direction and spread of this pandemic. Please realise the enormity of the situation. Social isolation for the time being is the only solution.