Leadership In The Pandemic

Prime Minister Narinder Modi considers President Donald Trump a friend. President Trump is bountiful in his praise of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. None of them are shy of publicising these apparently close relationships.

No doubt the three of them may share some positive character traits. Many people view all three as being stubborn, trigger happy, poor on major policy calls and excitable by criticism. Unsurprisingly, all three seemingly believe that in this crisis they have made no mistakes.

Although each country faces uniquely different challenges, all three of them made the same tragic mistake of not gearing up at the earliest opportunity for large scale antigen testing. The countries that have generally done better are those that started testing early and extensively. The USA, UK and India could have done so too, but chose to deliberate and lost precious time.

Of this trio, the UK, with its world class National Health System providing excellent universal coverage to an aging population, should have been best placed to act early, as only a robust public health system can deliver the depth of testing required.

As a former medical student at Oxford University and Guys’ Hospital London, the writer can confirm that for acute illnesses the UK is amongst the best placed in the world. There are only two countries that have lead the world in medical research: initially the UK, and then, since the late 1950s to this day, the USA.

Both countries have a rich medical sciences pedigree, most of the major medical discoveries can be allocated to one or the other country and both are hosts to gargantuan pharmaceutical industries. Both should be leading the world in this pandemic fight, yet both are falling well short.

PM Boris Johnson appeared for too long to not understand the gravity of the situation, was confused by having too many advisors and eventually only panicked when an Imperial College researcher projected 260,000 deaths, triggering the UK lockdown. In doing so he failed to leverage the reach of the NHS in fighting this epidemic. The failure to adequately test and procure has meant that infection has now spread farther and deeper than it should have.

The USA was always going to be challenged. Many are not surprised at the coronavirus data currently arising from there. The USA spends more on health care than any other nation on earth at about 17.3% of GDP but this expenditure has not benefitted the middle class, who are lumbered with astronomical health insurance costs, nor the poor who default to a shaky, under-resourced public health system.

The American system serves the rich well and has been effectively high jacked for decades by the pharmaceutical industry, the health care providers and the medical practitioners. The system is not structured to serve the public at large, and its inadequacies mean that the USA is at a material disadvantage in any pandemic fight.

Add to the mix a President that believes more in advice from the right wing media than he does in the scientific experts. Trump has failed America in the extreme. Tens of thousands of current and future mortalities could have been prevented had he this January instructed large scale antigen testing and ordered the requisite heath care equipment.

A country that has saved Europe on two gut wrenching occasions could not defend its own people adequately when the war had to be waged on its own turf. There can be no worse indictment of this shambolic presidency.

Turning to India, which like the USA has a medical services provision that competently serves the rich, and a public health care system that is both under-funded and grossly inefficient. Like the USA and the UK, India too failed to test massively and only started to procure long after the needs were obvious.

PM Modi is endeavouring to fight this war mostly by extreme lockdown but this a blunt weapon in countries like India where the overwhelming majority of the population, especially the poor, live in conditions where a lockdown does not reduce transmissibility; in fact it may accelerate it.

Most people in the USA and UK do not have to share a bedroom unless they choose to do so. Very few in the UK and USA count a single room as a home. India is the polar opposite where a lockdown has the potential for a dramatically different outcome for the poor.

Compounding the problem in India are private practitioners closing shop en-masse just when they are most needed, and private hospitals, large and small, generally reluctant to admit anyone with typical coronavirus symptoms. Admittedly there is voluntary absenteeism in the public health care sector too but the current abdication of responsibility by the private sector is shocking in the extreme.

There is a time bomb ticking that this government is underestimating. What could have been contained as a largely urban issue has now, on account of poor planning, been dispersed to the villages by returning labour.

The coronavirus pandemic currently raging in many countries, and accelerating in India, has proven to be a rigorous test for all leaders. However, this trio of apparent friends have been found wanting. Their personal equations may survive this crisis, but sadly whole swathes of their respective populations, that could have been saved, will not.

Jassi Khangura Ex-MLA, Ludhiana