The blatant truth is that nobody is ready for the
coronavirus. No country is ready or was ready for the pandemic. As new cases of
the coronavirus spiked on the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned
that the world was not ready for it. The world has seen doctors and
anesthesiologists in developed countries look helpless as people succumb to the
virus. In Bergamo, Italy, they are calling it the apocalypse.
I feel apologetic to our kinsmen in the village. This is due
to the measures that have been put in place to slow and flatten the curve of
infection. The virus is already creating havoc even before it lands. Funeral
ceremonies, dowry negotiations, and market days have been halted. For a common
villager, these are what define village life. It is a pandemic that is creating
sorrow and misery where it visits.
In the village, people come together during such periods to
help one another through. The strangest thing about the coronavirus is that we
cannot help one another through it. We can’t hold hands; we can only wash them.
In fact, to help, we have been explicitly told to stay away from one another.
Social distancing, quarantine, and isolation go hard against the gregarious
instinct that makes the village.
Every other time that villagers face a natural disaster,
they come together. This is witnessed in the number of people who attend
funerals. In the village, greetings are highly regarded, especially in the
physical form. Visiting each other frequently is a social norm. In fact, the
village is a picturesque representation of the saying, ‘No man is an island.’
Fruits come in plenty. Most are consumed without being washed. Meals are shared
ceremoniously. Are they ready to relinquish all these? With the coronavirus,
they will have to.
There is little way to be of use except to disappear inside
your home. Countries that have been hit the most are under total lockdown.
Indeed, even the places they gather for solace are off-limits. Churches are
closed in Italy and in South Korea. Even the things that take our minds off
crises are closed off. Sport is known to ease feelings of pain, fear, and
anger. All of this is wise, of course.
People in the village will have to understand this. For the
villagers, isolation comes at a real cost. Loneliness turns out to be a huge
factor in diminishing human lives. It is scientifically proven that everything
we can measure, from immune response to the onset of dementia to
coronary-artery disease is worsened, often dramatically, in people with fewer
friends. Villagers will have to care about the physical risks other than the
social cost. They should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to
think a little about how to make changes to some of our archaic traditions,
such as wife inheritance.
When sixty million people in Hubei province China, were put
under lockdown, it was the largest quarantine in human history. Today the
Chinese are celebrating the result of constraining such a large number of
people. New infections in Wuhan have been eliminated. In Italy, where others
are not taking the quarantine seriously, the rate of new infections is
exponential.
Although people in the village will complain that the
measures are incoherent and enforcement unfeasible, they have little choice but
to conform for survival. The government is urging those in towns to stay away
from the village. This is prudent enough.
The government is aware that even in towns where the
majority are well educated, they are not taking measures seriously. After two
weeks on the ground in China, WHO concluded that the draconian measures China
imposed might have saved hundreds of thousands of people from infection. We
have all got to look at our systems as a country. None of them work fast
enough.
We, therefore, have a mandate to ensure the village is ready
for COVID-19. We should be agents of information to our mates in the village
and not agents of transmission. They require our guidance and not presence. Let
us all do our part in stopping the spread of COVID-19.