Is Pakistan next?
It’s hard to recall the last time any of us were able to spend so much time at home with our families and engage in discussions pertaining to any global occurrence the way we have been doing during the “Great Lockdown”.
While it has been getting increasingly evident over the course of these past few years, it is now becoming painfully clear that the generational gap between our parents and our youth is getting wider and wider every passing day. What seems like idiocy to one appears as wisdom to the other.
My cognizance of this generational divide has increased manifold during the pandemic. I’m sure, like me, many of the readers would have come across sensible people reaching unfounded conclusions on how, for instance, the blessings of the holy month of Ramadan will somehow bring about an end to COVID’s reign of terror. Or examine this nonsensical theory doing the rounds on social media about how the USA is suffering among the worst hit countries as divine punishment for the atrocities it has committed in the past.
While it is absolutely essential to stay positive amidst this pandemic, there is a very bold line between thinking rationally and constructing conspiracy theories willy-nilly. “Faith” and “blind faith” are two distinct thought processes, and the former should not be transformed into the latter solely due to the lack of research and evidence. We as a nation have made it our prerogative to justify our inadequate amount of information and background knowledge by devising bizarre events and their associated causes.
It is very important for us to fight two wars here, one against poverty and the other against the coronavirus, but sometimes opening up two fronts without adequate resources might result in losing both, something we as a nation cannot afford
Many are wondering as to how Pakistan has been fairly successful in containing COVID-19, whereas the West (specifically the USA) has been engulfed in a health crisis like never before. Ironically, while a country whose economic might, infrastructure and health resources are exponentially more than ours has been hit so badly by the virus; for some unknown reason we are still doing pretty fine. Various theories have emerged to somehow explain why this is so. Some suggest that warmer temperatures are probably playing a role and hence the virus is not as contagious in our part of the world. Scientists have however rejected the argument as completely baseless and without any credible evidence. Another reason might be our demography compared to that of the USA, where there the number of people above 30 is significantly higher while our populations median age is 22.5 years. Scientists at GILEAD labs argue that the widespread immunization of infants with Tuberculosis vaccine Bacillus Calmette Guerin (BCG) in Pakistan has played a role resulting in the virus being less fatal. Maybe our lifestyle choices have just made our immune systems stronger and more adaptable to any kind of virus, including the coronavirus.
We can always compare a few very basic numbers and statistics which can help us see which direction Pakistan is sailing in.
Data from John Hopkins University suggests that so far the USA has conducted 24,937,877 tests. On average, taking 50 states into account, the USA is conducting 100,000 tests each day. Of the tests conducted, 2,163,290 people have tested positive, 117,717 people have died and the remaining are still being treated.
The USA has adopted a very rigorous testing strategy after the White House’s initial downplaying of the virus. There were about 5,000 deaths each day in the early stages of the outbreak but since the enactment of the lockdown and social distancing measures they have dwindled to about 2000 each day. The curve has also been somewhat flattened where the daily count of new cases has decreased from about 40,000 per day to 20,000. The mortality rate of the virus in the USA comes out to be about 5.5 percent. The USA has conducted the highest number of tests worldwide but its per capita testing is still behind that of the UK and Italy, owing to its much larger population. For every million people the US has conducted 28,482 tests. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert and the Center for Drug and disease control (CDC) have been urging the federal government to further increase the testing capacity and adopt a “testing, tracing and quarantining strategy” to contain the virus. This is the only way their states can ease lockdowns and prevent the country from falling into a financial recession similar to the one of 2007 or the Great depression.
That was the world’s worst affected country. Pakistan’s tally is very different, not because we aren’t affected but because we don’t even know what has hit us till this ticking time bomb explodes. The official government statistics report that there are currently 160,118 positive cases in the country. Of these cases, 3,093 deaths have been reported and 59,215 people have recovered. Everything looks and seems well with the aforementioned data. This is just like buying a piece of land with a very good per square foot rate but without actually knowing the total area of the land being bought. Given the above numbers, Pakistan’s mortality rate is just 1.93 percent, which is nothing worse than the common flu. The only thing we need to realize is that these numbers do not even come close to reflecting the ground reality. The total number of tests conducted stand at 982,012 and Pakistan has just recently increased the testing capacity to about 30,000 tests each day. 982,012 tests are basically what the USA is capable of carrying out in simply just days. So if a lack of diagnosed cases due to insufficient testing keeps our numbers low and gives us this false sense of assurance that we are doing fine, then there is a dire need to restructure our evaluation process and reasoning. There have been a lot of deaths recently which have been attributed to causes other than covid-19. While it might be true that those deaths did not occur due to the coronavirus, we also do not know if they actually did. In such a scenario, we only have one option and that is to increase testing to accurately delineate the situation.
The reported data is not only deflated in Pakistan, but also in a lot of countries. Public health officials have been urging the authorities to keep the transmission of information as transparent as possible. Only this can enable the public to act as needed, otherwise the virus will be taken lightly, especially in a country like Pakistan where there is an extremely high illiteracy rate. According to WHO, Pakistan spends about 2.8 percent of its GDP on health, has 1 doctor for every 1034 people and 0.8 hospital beds per 1000 citizens. These statistics are reflective of an already fragile healthcare system and this system can easily break under the pressure of an exorbitant number of corona patients. Pakistan must be very careful as it begins to ease its lockdown, open public transport and shopping malls. It is very important for us to fight two wars here, one against poverty and the other against the coronavirus, but sometimes opening up two fronts without adequate resources might result in losing both, something we as a nation cannot afford.
