By Pramod D'Souza
Bengaluru, Mar 15: What is the need for a buzzing city like Bengaluru to brace for a lockdown when there are only five confirmed cases of coronavirus herein? Are we overreacting to the situation? Of course not - and I must say the government of Karnataka has acted with responsibility and determination by shutting down malls, pubs, clubs and other public gatherings as a preventive measure to curb coronavirus.
A peek into the India healthcare delivery system in numbers, shows that the country has only 1.3 hospital beds per 1000 population and 0.65 doctors to handle the same quantum size (courtesy 2015 statistics), whereas the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 5 beds per 1000 population. The country’s average is alarming and we are already in a crisis, with the comparisons way below the recommended statistics. For handling normal ailments, a city like Bengaluru with a 12 million population should ideally have about 60,000 beds, going by the WHO recommendation and the city’s medical curative infrastructure is nowhere even close to the required aggregate. On the other hand, per se even if Bengaluru was to have the recommended beds, does it have the healthcare system entailed to handle as fatal a pandemic as coronavirus?
A cosmopolitan city like Bengaluru, if not controlled, is highly prone to this disease being spread like wildfireto thousands of people in just a matter of a few days. As a case study on just two parameters out of the many transport systems the city uses everyday, which includes autorickshaws, cabs, ola, uber, and other private transport, an average of 4 lac people travel on Namma Metro daily and its counterpart BMTC has a daily ridership of 36 lac on its fleet of buses. Imagine the situation even if a few people infected with the deadly virus should be travelling on public transport like Metro or BMTC!
Since coronavirus infections spread even before the person shows symptoms, it would mean a normal healthy-looking person could very well be carrying the disease and spreading it to many people at public places. This can grow exponentially in a city like Bengaluru if not controlled in the first few days itself. In a situation when the infection rate is greater than 2 (every infected person infects 2 or more people), then we are likely to go the Italy way, where coronavirus is spreading rapidly and already has 21,000 confirmed cases and counting (with fatality rate of 6.8%).
Bengaluru’s population density can make things even worse and if it indeed happens, we would easily be touching the upper limit of our healthcare delivery system that would be left lurching helplessly at a huge healthcare crisis. Doctors would be left with a difficult choice of selecting patients on some criteria and this could deprive hospital admissions to the many which may potentially increase the fatality rate.
With the lethal coronavirus on the prowl and no vaccine yet to prevent, what’s the way out? Experts recommend social distancing - and that’s what precisely the government in Karnataka has done by shutting down malls, pubs, public events, social gatherings etc. It’s all done in the interest of the citizens and hence becomes the moral responsibility of each one of us, to do our little bit by cooperating with the government in this mammoth task of containing this unwelcomed calamity.
If we all do our part by confining ourselves to our homes and dwellings and avoid meeting people, for the next one week to ten days, then we would have made a constructive contribution to the government’s initiative as the chances of further spreading the virus is definitely curbed. This in turn will help our fellow citizens and in a way the efforts of the country to contain this pandemic effectively.
(Author is a senior manager at LogMeIn India, co-founder of Eagle10 Ventures and associate director of Kanara Entrepreneurs. He can be reached at Pramod.dsouza@gmail.com)