INDIA vs PANDEMIC

How do you feel, when you lose your father? Yes, when your father is no more. We can’t even imagine the loss, but Dr. Anil Ananthaswamy is a bit glad to lose his father. Yes, it's strange to hear but he is happy that his father died before this pandemic and not in the pandemic. His father died with some other disease but not COVID-19. He feels that his dad is lucky to die with the entire family by his bedside but, not alone. He came to this realization after reading the tweets from Dr. Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco as an ICU doctor treating seriously ill COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Weiss stated that this is not the way anyone should die. These poor people have been tied to a bed for 20-40 + days with a tube stuck in their throats, unable to speak, delirious and disoriented, in pain, drugged, weak, tired, hungry, scared, and completely alone. The reality of the disease is one just can't understand that unless they see it, and that's the problem. No one sees it. Its completely like a metaphor, one gets sick in little days but they take months to recover. This is just like a pandemic, which occurs in some days but takes months to recover. If the patients recover, they are far from okay. Their muscles are atrophied. These patients are profoundly weak to the point where they can barely move even their facial muscles. They're just completely ravaged and malnourished beyond your wildest imagination," said Weiss.

"They are not just going to go home and return to their normal life. They are going to need months of intense rehabilitation…That's going be a pretty profound impact," he added. This is becoming apparent to these patients that getting out of the ventilator and out of the ICU is just the beginning of a long path to full recovery.

 Dr.Anil concludes that We have to listen to doctors like Weiss to get a visceral sense of the death and the misery that engulfed ICUs around the world, or we risk suffering through it all over again.

He is afraid that we are in danger of getting it wrong and going back to where we started. ICUs will be flooded. Patients will die alone. And their families and friends will be unable to take part, the way he could with his father, in the most likely and possible thing, that is to be done when death is final.

What more can he think about his father’s demise than to feel lucky to lose him before this pandemic?

When that is the scenario of a country like the USA, what would be the situation in INDIA if this outbreak continues with the same acceleration as of now? Being a highly populated country, we have already seen some humiliating deaths in India.

Our history shows that Nazist Hitler killed many war prisoners, not only with weapons but, with HUNGER i.e. not providing the prisoners a piece of bread. Do you think this virus is less harmful? Absolutely not. Many poor migrant laborers died on roads, railway stations, railway tracks with hunger. They have walked hundreds of kilometers just to save themselves and be with their loved ones. As of now, hospitals are already flooded, people are dying alone, poor lives with Covid-19 are worst.

INDIA is not a highly developed country with a sophisticated health care system. With very low sanitation and medical facilities, scarcity of doctors, we have already witnessed the worst deaths in India. Think before you step out of your home. Stay home, stay safe. Maintain social distancing.