The need for an emergency-services

Altaf Bashir

No one could imagine four months before that Covid-19 existed and could spread almost every country at the alarming speed and infect as many as one million souls. It was unimaginable to believe that economies would be crashed, and health care system would breakdown, hospitals would be filled with infected patients and public spaces would be emptied. The Covid-19 has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has almost disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most of us in the valley will know someone who has been infected, were the main spreaders and start distancing from themselves. 

The global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, many healthcare experts warned of the possibility of such type of epidemic, and in the Valley, we already knew that our preparedness is not existing anywhere in comparison to the developed countries healthcare system.

We have not learned any lessons from the past experiences where we faced disasters, earthquakes and floods of high magnitude. Nonetheless, it is not a local phenomenon where healthcare and other allied sectors were ignored. It seemed a global trend such as Italy and Spain offered grim warnings about the future. Hospitals were out of rooms, supplies, and staff. They were not able to save everyone, doctors have been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are likely to survive, while letting others die.  

The unpreparedness and the lack of proper disaster management in place caused various problems across the globe. The Trump announced two years back to close the White House pandemic office which was established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014. The intention behind creating such an office in the White House was to do everything possible within vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic.  

On the contrary Kashmir was battling with major flood in 2014 after which we were adamant to devise a proper disaster management policy to prevent future catastrophes. Very little has transpired for last six years and especially when everything was settled people forget that they needed the policy for disaster management.

 Similarly, for last 70 years we have not upgraded healthcare infrastructure. I remember when one of the American-Kashmiri origin cardiologists visited valley to open a cardio hospital the government didn’t allow them to materialize the dream. A lot of politics was going on to stop him to build a hospital to ease the patients of the valley.

Now in 2020 when we are struggling to prevent Covid-19 infection the government has announced a lockdown so that everyone stays indoors for a certain period till the transmission of infection is contained. This policy will work for a certain period, but it brings a lot of challenges too. The basic amenities for the people who have no source of income except daily wage will face a challenge to survive in this period of pandemic.

However, many healthcare professionals and epidemiologist have applauded this lockdown move, and they might be right in theory, but none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest population under lockdown of what it was meant to achieve. 

No matter, social distancing and mask wearing is important at this moment of time. Since, these practices decrease infection spread, but it is costly both economically and psychologically. When society eventually reopens, risk reduction measures like maintaining personal space and practicing proper handwashing will be essential to reducing high-dose infections.

People would be advised to avoid high risk sites for high-dose exposure like stadium and convention venue, should remain shuttered.

For future, we need to have a proper disaster management in place, health-care infrastructure, hospitals, paramedical staff and emergency staff so that we will be prepared for the future eventualities.

Pandemics, historically, have forced humans to break with the past and reimagine anew world. This would be no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can opt to walk through it, and leave behind our carcasses of prejudice and hatred, our dead ideas of polarization and walk through lightly, with a little luggage, and help people, and upgrade the basic infrastructure, which helps humans to stay for a longer period of time, and serve the communities with love and care. For that, we need to fight it, and beat the virus that invaded our spaces, and created a panic situation, where we are afraid to touch a door handle, a bag of vegetable, sans imagining it swarming with those undead bacteria waiting to fasten onto our lungs. We are scared to touch even our face. But hope is pushing us to move ahead and leave behind the trails of past composed with painful memories.