From shaman’s syrup to docs’ pills

Tuesday 11th May, 2021

The Covid-19 morbidity and mortality rates have been on the rise steadily since the conclusion of the recent avurudu celebrations. What we are experiencing at present looks the early warnings of a viral tsunami, whose landfall is only a matter of time. The national healthcare system has reached breaking point, as a collective of professional outfits––the Sri Lanka Medical Association, the Government Medical Officers Association, the Association of Medical Specialists, and the SLMA Intercollegiate Committee––have pointed out in a letter to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Unless urgent action is taken to reduce the worsening caseloads, people will start dying here in their numbers on roads without treatment, as in India. The first thing that needs to be done to prevent the rapid transmission of the pandemic is to impose movement restrictions, which the good doctors have recommended in their letter. If travel among districts had been banned, or at least restricted, during the recent festive season, the country would not have been in the current predicament. The government allowed the public to do as they pleased, for political reasons, and we are where we are today.

The doctors’ associations have, in their letter, made some science-based recommendations such as the imposition of movement restrictions, the isolation of areas depending on density of caseloads, the strengthening of the curative sector by supplying adequate facilities, especially oxygen, ICU facilities and laboratory services countrywide for diagnosis of COVID-19 with PCR testing, and the acceleration of the national vaccination drive.

Some of these recommendations may not find favour with the government, which tends to lay everything on the Procrustean bed of political expediency. But they are the proverbial stitch in time, which, if implemented urgently, will spare the government and the country a lot of trouble in the future. The pills that docs have prescribed are bitter but have to be swallowed.

It is popularly said in this country that when politicians have power, they have no brains, and vice versa—mole thiyanakota bale ne, bale thiyanakota mole ne. So, the problem with most government politicians is that they consider themselves far more knowledgeable than experts such as doctors, engineers, scientists and environmentalists. One may recall that a minister of the current administration once asked what the use of having oxygen was, during a heated argument with an intrepid female Forest Officer who opposed a move to destroy a mangrove forest, pointing out that environmental degradation would reduce the oxygen level in the air. He demanded to know whether oxygen could be eaten—oxygen kannada. A ministerial colleague of his did something cretinous, the other day, exposing the public to Covid-19.

Piliyandala, a populous section of the conurbation of Colombo, accounted for nearly one half of 755 Covid-19 cases reported from the Colombo District, yesterday. The health authorities’ decision to impose movement restrictions in the Piliyandala police area, last week, has been vindicated by the rapid increase in infections there during the past few days. If the restrictions had not been lifted at the behest of Minister Gamini Lokuge, the situation could have been brought under control. Lokuge has sought to justify his intervention to have the decision of the Director General of Health Services (DGHS), who alone can decide on lockdowns, movement restrictions, etc., countermanded, by claiming that such action would have affected daily wage earners in Piliyandala, which is his electorate. True, the vulnerable sections of society have to be protected, but an explosive transmission of the pandemic will have a far more devastating impact on them as well as others than a lockdown. Of economic hardships and an increase in the pandemic death toll, which is the worse? It is not only the residents of Piliyandala who undergo economic hardships owing to lockdowns and other such Covid-19 preventive measures. What if the ruling party politicians in other parts of the country emulate Lokuge? The DGHS will not be able to have any area locked down, in such an eventuality.

Meanwhile, other countries battling the new variants of the virus have adopted double masking, which has proved quite effective in curbing the spread of the pandemic. Why it has not been made mandatory here is the question.

One can only hope that the doctors’ letter at issue will knock some sense into the ruling party politicians and their officials in charge of the anti-Covid-19 campaign. There is no reason why a government that chose to do as a crafty shaman said, and even promoted his peniya or syrup, touted as a cure for Covid-19, should not take the views of respected medical professionals on board and act accordingly.