Public Health: One year into the ‘pandemic’,by Ms Manika Malhotra -Researcher, Policy Perspectives Foundation

World marks one year since the WHO declared covid-19 outbreak, first detected in China, as a global pandemic in March 2020. India was also put into complete lockdown, on 24th March 2020, to stem the spread of coronavirus cases when it was witnessing less than 600 cases and 10 deaths per day. Experts believed that forcing people to stay inside would break the chain and give officials adequate time to ramp up testing and enhance efforts as well as medical facilities. The outbreak came as a wake-up call for India’s creaking health care infrastructure which was overwhelmed within few days of rising covid-19 cases. Many experts stated that due to no similar experiences in recent past, the nation was not adequately prepared to handle the needs of a pandemic. Despite these challenges, the speed at which the doctors, frontline workers etc. adapted and made use of available resources to meet the requirements is commendable. The entire nation came together to fight the ‘new’, ‘unknown’ and ‘deadly’ corona virus. Not sure, if the lessons learnt will be enough to face future pandemics, but have definitely fallen short to address the persisting as well new challenges of the ‘ongoing’ covid-19 pandemic.

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