On July 1, India observed the Doctor’s Day amid the raging corona pandemic. Observation of the day began in 1991 in memory of legendary physician-statesman Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, former Chief Minister of West Bengal, who coincidentally was born and gone on the same date.
The day is observed to express gratitude to the physicians who have been tirelessly working for saving lives and maintaining health of the people. Doctors have to be protected on all fronts, or else precious lives would be lost. Many doctors, now recognised as corona warriors, have laid down lives like soldiers on the borders. So far, 50 warrior doctors have become corona martyrs in India. Further, 769 healthcare workers have turned corona-positive at the AIIMS with five dead. At the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, 562 healthcare workers got infected with three gone. The dead include doctors, nurses, support staffs, ward boys, pharmacists and sanitation workers.
But with times and climes changing, the ethical standards of doctors have also taken a big beating. They have become mercilessly greedy especially after corporate hospitals set up shops all over the country. The cash-crazy corporate outfits enticed top-grade doctors away even from public hospitals by dangling fat salary packages and trained them to behave as baits to attract patients. Consequently, greedy doctors began stooping low to dupe hapless patients into coughing out more money than usual. These ruthless hospitals pressurise doctors to make sure revenue rises by unscrupulous acts of unnecessary diagnostic tests and dump unrelated visiting doctors on them to fatten the treatment bills.
Apart from this, money-mad doctors also write prescriptions for unnecessary medicines and placebos to get cuts from the drugs manufacturers. So, most doctors just prescribe whatever the drug representative recommends. Pharmacists, who know much more about drugs, are least utilised in determining the exact drug. The doctor loathes pharmacists and ignores them openly. A six-year pharmacy course actually hammers a great deal drug knowledge into a pharmacist. But these knowledgeable guys are purposefully kept hidden in the backside storeroom only to count pills. All the same, that without doctors life would be miserable is plain truth. But ethical doctors are a vanishing tribe.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused by the increasing global spread of the coronavirus has triggered contagions in four other domains -- information, economy, psychology and behaviour. It is important to recognise and address these four contagions in order to bring the fast-spreading infection under control.
The information pandemic or ‘infodemic': people have been deluged by a contagion of both good and bad information about the coronavirus over the past months so much so as to experience a mini epidemic of ‘coronajokes'. Infodemic has caused a lot of panic and also careless behaviour. Correct information about the outbreak status, epidemiological models, learning from other countries' experiences, effective treatment options and so on do help individuals make better decisions. They also compel governments to stay on top of the information cycles, failing which authorities begin to lose credibility and public trust. This calls for daily briefings and real-time sharing of accurate data. India’s health authorities are not perfectly there yet. As cases keep shooting up, the authorities must improve their information dissemination methods.
Tackling bad information is a harder problem because there is already a widely spread fake news infrastructure that transcends television, social media and word-of-mouth. If quackery, unscientific techniques and bigotry were just bad before the pandemic, spreading them at this time should be termed criminal. The fact that big celebrities like Rajinikanth and Amitabh Bachchan transmitted these dangerous memes to millions of people should worry us.
Odisha is doing impressively well on the information dissemination efforts. Healthcare professionals keep sharing all simple yet critical information with least frightening data on the mainstream as well as social media to keep people safe and careful. Once in a while, wrong personalities bump in to bore and confuse the masses with irrelevant dramatics and religious crap. One guy, rumoured to be a skill master, materialises oftentimes to pour out absolutely meaningless information and stale data in a manner that sensible masses find useless and uninspiring. Recently, he said, as if he were a researching medical scientist, that when ‘RNA count drops, immunity goes haywire’,- least knowing that the genetic material has nothing to do with being immune.
The ‘economic contagion', of which the financial and stock market meltdown is a leading indicator, is already posing massive policy challenges and will persist long after the virus is contained. A global recession and an unprecedented shock to a slowing Indian economy mean that growth will grind down. Households, firms and governments will suffer economic losses, which will certainly cascade through the economy in complex, hard-to-predict ways.
The Indian government will face a surge in healthcare costs, demands for social spending to ameliorate the losses faced by the poor and to provide a stimulus to rekindle growth. It has very little fiscal room to begin afresh, and that even is shrinking as tax collections will slow down more in near future. Raising taxes will hurt growth prospects, and it will not be compensating hundreds of millions of wage earners and the poor who will suffer disproportionately. The longer the viral pandemic, the worse will be the economic contagion.
Next, ‘psychological pandemic' packages fear, uncertainty and doubt. This one is very contagious too. For instance, the moment we see a person wearing a mask, we get anxious and spread the anxiety to our family members, neighbours and friends. In result, there would be criminal stigmatisation, flight and mass hysteria, riots and upsurges in religiosity. Moreover, the new anxieties would only add to the old ones within the overall climate of extreme political partisanship and worsening social harmony that prevailed even before Covid-19 came along. If left unmanaged, the psychological contagion can both undermine all efforts to contain the virus and revive the economy.
Finally, there is a ‘contagion of human behaviour' too, both good and bad. The good part is when washing hands and working from home catches on. The bad is when people ostracise victims, attack groups suspected of transmitting the virus, avoid screening, escape quarantine, hoard medical supplies, try to make a fast buck from profiteering, congregate for religious events, and so on.
It must be known well that Odisha is now considered a model region where the pandemic has been laudably contained with meticulous planning at both macro and micro levels. The administrators have put healthcare professionals to an inspired mode of delivering services. Hence, fantastic results are witnessed now. Odisha administrators, under the stewardship of a humane Chief Minister, have proven to be supremely sensitive and responsive to the pandemic. Public officials including doctors and other healthcare professionals have been adequately inspired to be people-friendly when it comes to treating the poor and the disadvantaged. Odisha was the first State to impose lockdown in India. Modi did it later.
