Covid-19 - A Pandemic

It was foretold, but we never believed that a crumbling infrastructure in the wealthy world would make all of us victims

- Richard Mahapatra

The planet is locked in containment. Barring lifestyle diseases, no other disease or infection has ever caught the grip of the globe in contemporary time—176 countries, and over 2,00,000 patients spread in every continent, except the Antarctica. Rich or poor, some 3 billion people are virtually in containment as 112 countries have closed their borders . We are in the midst of what is called the containment stage in the global protocol to fight a pandemic.

But the invisible foe—covid-19—has already escaped from our radar. It is spreading faster than anyone had expected. Between the period Down To Earth did its last cover story on coronavirus in February, and now writing this unprecedented second cover closing on March 20, cases outside China–the origin of the pandemic–have increased by 15-fold (see graph: “Tipping point”). Our helplessness to control this first non-flu pandemic of the 21st century has resulted in panic and hysteria. Health experts are no more hopeful of containment because we still don’t know the real number of cases from poor and developing countries that are ill-equipped to screen and count such cases.