COVID Mis-management: Failure to act on time, delayed vaccination & undercounted deaths?

Updated: 6/14/2024
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Last Updated: 26 May 2024

1. Failure to gauge & act on Covid threat in time

  • Covid situation: Dec19 & Jan20:

December 2019: First cases of novel coronavirus (nCoV) were first detected in China[1]
30 January 2020: WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)[1:1]

Indian Govt busy in Trump Rally

24/25 February 2020: Indian Govt & by PM Modi was holding 'Namaste Trump' rally at Ahmedabad with lakhs in attendance[2]

  • Covid situation: Mar2020:

11 March 2020: WHO declared Covid outbreak as pandemic

Indian Ruling party & PM busy in toppling Congress Govt in MP?[3]

10 March 2020: PM Narendra Modi & HM Amit Shah meeting Senior leader of INC, Jyotiraditya Scindia who later resigned from the Congress party along with his group of 22 rebel MLAs & joined BJP. He was offered RS ticket immediately after by BJP
21 March 2020: All the 22 rebel ex-Congress MLAs joined BJP
23 March 2020: Shivraj Singh Chouhan took oath as the new Chief Minister

24 March 2020: Lockdown was ordered by PM Modi next day after BJO forms govt in MP. A Tell Tale Coincidence???[4]

  • Possible Failure of the Government to restrict COVID, despite fragile Healthcarre system of India?

If the Airports were shut in 'Time', could PM Modi have given India a fighting chance to lessen the losses & pain?

In total, Rs 52.6 lakh crore of GDP has been lost in three years-or 12 percent of the actual GDP**[5]

2. A Man-made humanitarian crisis[6]

Sudden & stringent lcokdowns ensued A humanitarian crisis where

  • Migrant workers, stranded in the cities without jobs and bare necessities, returned to their hometowns
  • Many of them having to walk many kilometres to do so
  • The crisis was tackled by the state governments, themselves caught unprepared to deal with their returning migrant workers

3. Botched up vaccine policy until SC intervention[7][8]

  • Center govt initially
    • Apportioned the share of Vaccines for the Centre, states and private hospitals at 50:25:25
    • policy of providing vaccines free to the 45 and above category and not to the 18-44 segment

Central govt's vaccine policy was declared arbitrary & irrational by Supreme Court

After Supreme Court intervention, center govt agreed to free vaccines for all age groups

4. Delay in Vaccination[9]

  • As early as August 2020, Modi grandly declared that India had already worked out a vaccine distribution plan

India placed the first vaccine order as late as January 2021, that too for only 1.6 crore doses (Minuscule compared population of 1.4 billion)

The result: By the time second wave hit India with full intensity in April, just 0.5% of Indians had been fully vaccinated

  • Serum Institute was the world’s most prolific vaccine maker even before the pandemic and it relied on his own funds, along with international donors and deals with other countries to meet the pandemic challenge

Neither did the Indian government inject funds early on to help Serum Institute ramp up capacity, nor did it place bulk orders for vaccines

5. Undercounted COVID Deaths

WHO Report Shows No Other Country Has Undercounted COVID Deaths as Much as India[10]
-- India’s COVID-19 death toll is almost 10 times its official tally
-- India had the highest number of COVID-19 deaths until December 2021 – 47 lakh

Gujarat (Till 04 Feb 2022): Covid compensation claims vs Official dealths

Covid Death Claims Official Dealths Undercounting
1,02,230 10,614 ~10

Our holiest river, Ganga, swollen with bodies[11]

  • Hundreds of corpses have been found floating in the river or buried in the sand of its banks

How it hurts

  • Missing Helping Hand from Govt: Scale of destruction & pain people had to endure is humongous going by the numbers but Govt instead of providing helping hand, did undercounting to save face
  • Tracking Pandemic & Guiding Policy: Correct data is needed for this
    • COVID-19 deaths are a key indicator to track the evolution of the pandemic[12]
    • An evolutionary perspective can help understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic[13]

6. Mis-management of Oxygen supply in COVID

Central Government rightly took charge and allocated plants/quotas among states due to the sudden and massive requirement of oxygen

But Central Government did not pay attention to Supply Chain Management i.e. Oxygen Tanker Management & Routes were not optimised

Economic interests overrode human lives?[14]

  • The Centre has claimed that the oxygen supply had been banned for industrial use from April 22, 2021

The question, perhaps, is why not do it today itself? Why does the center have to wait until April 22?

Delhi High Court has warned the Centre several times for not adhering its decision to industrial benefits. It further stated economic interests could not override human lives

Supply Chain Mis-Management[15]

Peculiar situation:
-- Manufacturers were ready to raise production
-- Railways was ready to run as many trains as required
-- But there simply were not enough tankers and containers in India to ensure regular transportation

The situation was further aggravated, when some manufacturing states appropriated the tankers registered in their states even if they did not need them immediately

e.g. Delhi Case

  • Before Central Govt Stepped in, Delhi’s hospitals requisitioned their increased demand and already secured 325 MT of oxygen from their regular suppliers
  • After Central Govt role, Delhi’s quota was fixed by the Centre at 300 MT
  • By the time the quota was raised to 590 MT on May 1, the requirement of Delhi had already gone up to 700 MT
  • Moreover, this allocation was to be sourced from 13 plants spread across seven states, of which nearly 34 per cent was to be from Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal, which had no pre-existing oxygen supply chain with Delhi

University of Pennsylvania(USA) Study Report: While some of the poor performance is attributable to the peculiar nature of the pandemic virus, the ORF report concludes that conflictual federalism ensured that despite good medical facilities, the Delhi government was unable to manage the second wave of the pandemic well as healthcare systems collapsed[16]

University of Pennsylvania(USA) Study Report: It clear that it is the centralisation of the deficient oxygen supply, and poor infrastructure for storage and transportation that led to the crisis acquiring disastrous proportions and not the incompetence of the Delhi Government per se[16:1]

7. No consultation with states

Situation needed a collective team effort of Center & State govts but exact opposite was done

Stringent measures regarding lockdowns and containment zoning implemented without adequate knowledge of the ground situation

  • A fundamental criticism of the Centre’s response to the pandemic in the first wave was related to the sudden imposition of a nationwide lockdown without consulting the states
  • Impeded the states’ capacity to combat the spread of the virus: Centre’s blanket decisions and stringent measures regarding lockdowns and containment zoning—implemented without adequate knowledge of the ground situation[17]
  • States not allowed to purchase medical kits on their own: without the Centre’s permission. This impacted the states’ ability to mobilise and augment critical resources[18]
  • Friction with States: MHA deputed supervisory teams to states to monitor their responses to the pandemic without consulting the respective state governments[19]

References:

  1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/28/trump-modi-us-india-relationship-nationalism-isolationism/ ↩︎

  3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Madhya_Pradesh_political_crisis ↩︎

  4. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pm-announces-21-day-lockdown-as-covid-19-toll-touches-10/article61958513.ece ↩︎

  5. https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/mcminis/economy/how-much-gdp-has-india-lost-due-to-covid-19-8443171.html ↩︎

  6. https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/the-virus-trains-how-unplanned-lockdown-chaos-spread-covid-19-across-india-120121600103_1.html ↩︎

  7. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/sc-seeks-details-on-money-spent-for-procuring-vaccines-out-of-rs-35000-cr-funds/articleshow/83179926.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst ↩︎

  8. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/83311209.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst ↩︎

  9. https://time.com/6052370/modi-didnt-buy-enough-covid-19-vaccine/ ↩︎

  10. https://m.thewire.in/article/health/who-india-excess-covid-deaths-10-times ↩︎

  11. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57154564 ↩︎

  12. https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality ↩︎

  13. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2009787117#:~:text=An evolutionary perspective can help,the pandemic and its aftermath. ↩︎

  14. https://www.inventiva.co.in/stories/adequate-oxygen-supply/ ↩︎

  15. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/delhi-oxygen-shortage-arvind-kejriwal-government-supply-crisis-7320592/ ↩︎

  16. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/upiasi/Motwane Grant II - Farooqui-Sengupta paper.pdf (Page 10) ↩︎ ↩︎

  17. https://www.cnbctv18.com/economy/lockdown-relaxation-states-to-decide-but-within-home-ministry-guidelines-5773661.htm ↩︎

  18. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/covid-19-states-protest-against-centre-s-directive-on-ppe-procurement/story-C2HLEkLKvPL9gMYGA494LP.html ↩︎

  19. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/mamata-writes-to-pm-modi-protests-central-govt-team-s-visit-to-west-bengal-11587405367250.html ↩︎

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