With a broken healthcare infrastructure and the third-highest number of cases, it isn’t surprising that even the Supreme Court called the state of Delhi “ horrendous”. With patients running around in panic searching for beds and family members left unanswered and confused it becomes important to understand what exactly led to the deplorable condition that the city faces today.
The Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal announced last Sunday a decision which was first of its kind reserving hospital beds and equipment for only the residents of the capital. Delhi’s healthcare system was suffering from major load considering the astonishingly high number of cases that were coming every day. This decision was however overturned by The Lieutenant Governor of Delhi who saw it as an unconstitutional measure to put in place. The incident clearly displayed one of the major reasons behind the crippling healthcare system - the lack of clarity and policy changes that happen every second, which leave not only the public but also the administration and management confused.
As cases increased, Delhi CM ordered private hospitals such as Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (one of the most prestigious hospitals in the city) to be turned into COVID treatment centres, however, these hospitals were given such short notice that they couldn’t possibly prepare to take the burden of treatment. Not only that, these hospitals had a large number of non-COVID patients in sensitive conditions whose treatment was left to question when such orders were thrown at them. At the same time, the CM barred six private labs and two public labs from testing because they were allegedly found not following Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) guidelines. In a city which was already choking, these policy decisions carried out with poor miscommunication only added to the chaos and seemed illogical to the public eye.
The decisions carried out were a reaction to the complaints regarding the refusal of treatment and other problems that the residents of the capital were facing Earlier last week the CM had warned private hospitals which were being accused of black marketing hospital bed, instead of obliging to their duty, some hospitals were allegedly selling beds for lakhs of rupees and obtaining treatment in such places required patients to either pull political strings or be willing to spend any amount of money for a bed. To counteract, the Delhi government launched an app which would provide hospital bed information on a public platform, however, it soon became evident that this too was a policy failure since none of the information was updated in real-time.
Unfortunately, finding a bed wasn’t t the end of problems for citizens of Delhi, who even after admission continue to face the horrors within hospital walls. With mortuaries filled with bodies, families share devastating stories of not getting information about patients whereabouts as an overworked staff finds it difficult to keep track of recovery and deaths. Even as numbers rise, testing has actually gone down and many suspect that the actual data isn’t even being disclosed. The CM had promised the citizens in a speech before that while the unlocking will continue, the healthcare system was prepared to deal with the brunt of the pandemic but with families finding it difficult to even carry out proper burial services the actual condition of Delhi is far from it.
A more important question however that seems to be buried is the gross power play and business tactics that are being used by governments in handling the pandemic. Be it states refusing to account for patients leading almost 8000 unassigned patients or the refusal of treatment in state hospitals by Delhi government - the bio-politics play is obvious yet ignored. This goes beyond national politics and has reached a global stage where countries are hiding data, strains and samples in fear that they may be used to develop vaccines which will later be marketed at very high prices, thus making it unavailable to them. Post allegations being thrown at China and the World Health Organisation (WHO) on not taking enough preventive action and their delayed response, the debate is now shifted its focus to whether ethics and humanity oblige governments to share biological data and vaccines. The pandemic had already revealed the inequality in the health care system not only inside the nation, but amongst them as well as some countries fought to gain access to resources and others are involved in a contest to develop the vaccine. With a biopolitical war of sorts, it is the public interest which is being overshadowed and as numbers keep rising it becomes important to ask if our society can stand to fulfil its humanitarian responsibility.
This pandemic shed a light on the capabilities of our leaders , but it also brought forth the obvious communication and implementational gaps which weren’t symptoms of the disease, but an ailment that our policymakers have been long-suffering from. Case in point is the Baghjan Oil Well fire which broke on last Tuesday in Tinsukia district of Assam. The well was owned by Oil India Limited, which for some inexplicable reason continued to ignore a 14-day gas leak which resulted in a massive fire that destroyed everything in a kilometre radius and took the lives of two firefighters. The fire was so huge that it could even be spotted at a 10 km distance and has resulted in an evacuation of almost 7000 people. Not only this, the biodiversity in the area has permanently been damaged which included multiple biodiversity hotspots and a national park. The damage caused was a resultant of a callous administration and the government-owned OIL’s silence only provides a testimony to their ignorance.
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