Globalization has helped corona virus infection take the shape of a pandemic so fast. This virus first emerged in China and within few months it has spread to almost all countries. The virus is very contagious and yet due to varied symptoms, diagnosis can remain elusive for some time. This allows person to person transmission go undetected; and with no vaccine or cure, the only way to stop the spread of virus is to restrict international travel and home quarantine people until the virus fades away. regardless of the risk status. This sort of complete lock-down of all citizens for such long period is not possible without the State providing sufficient social security. China was able to do so with some strict policing and now reports no new cases.
Capitalist State doesn’t provide shelter, food, or health. It just acts as a facilitator for private capital to do the job. Market demand and capability to pay determines such eligibility. So, despite Chinese data, rich countries like US and Europe have been passive at the outset, and are now paying the price. Europe has in fact now more cases and deaths, compared to China. Meanwhile, stock markets around the globe collapsed as private enterprises started pulling their money out of market. This is when the State decided to take over the social non-profit venture of saving humanity. Since then Europe has started to maximize efforts to provide free healthcare to all. Spain has nationalized all private hospitals. State is taking care of house rents, interests on loans, and even paying direct handouts as salaries to sustain the growing unemployment unseen since economic depression, 1929. Collapse of Wall street has prompted Trump to pump $1 trillion into the economy as a bail out measure to avoid mass closure. This is when average US citizens are still unable to afford treatment in absence of universal health coverage like Europe.
Meanwhile, poor countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh has given up right from the start. Corona testing is restricted to avoid panic driven outburst. This is while State is putting half-hearted effort to build quarantine facilities with bare minimum standards for positive cases. Rich people for a change are on the run, avoiding sharing room with poor strangers. Conventional wisdom of money and power is in fact proving to be suicidal for the society as a whole. Poor people are also having a hard time to grasp the concept of home quarantine, while busy devising ways to avoid dying of hunger caused by economic shutdown. Indian State has not yet assured such basic social security for the poor, without which this whole exercise of preventing spread of virus will remain futile.
Public health sector, in anticipation is also gearing up to provide below-par treatment. Crippled over decades of scarce funding, public health resources are precisely lacking to tackle such large-scale health problem. State of art critical care and isolation facilities required to reduce such deaths are available only in big corporate hospitals, meant to cater the few rich. This lack of universal health access (like Europe) to quality healthcare can eventually lead to high mortality in advent of any serious spread of corona virus in India. But politicians still remain in denial as they remain on the side-lines, waiting for the ill-equipped government healthcare providers to take the fall.
Epilogue
Fear of death from secular corona virus has at last united people of all religion to believe in science. People are now hoping against all odds that science is going to win the war, even when best of the brains in the world has shifted to cater wall street over the last 3 decades. Meanwhile, Trump continues to stress the importance of the private pharma industry in bringing the all essential vaccine in future, hoping to make billions of dollar profit. This is a competition where nobody wants to pool world resources for the sake of humanity, and can actually turn out to be suicidal.
