A Guide to Surviving Covid in an Increasing Complacent Nation

 “There was a deliberate smashing of pots; people making a clamor. This may be an illustration of a population experiencing traumatic shock. It might have been done in panic but also might have been done to somehow disturb and clear the air.” Hays wrote about a supposed act of an angry god when he described the plague in his book “Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impact on Human History”. But he could have been writing about us in the present day and our initial attempts to hush away a disease that has yet not been properly understood.

‘The Mask is a tool to make us weak’. Our attention turned towards the driver as he went off on an extempore detailing the complex inter-relationship between Carbon Dioxide and the mask. His logic was as we exhale carbon dioxide, the mask forces us to inhale it all in, thereby weakening our body’s immune system. This was a novel conspiracy theory in a world filled with absurd theories on the covid pandemic.

Seven months into the pandemic, the inventory of rumours related to the covid outbreak have managed to transcend boundaries - creative and the inane, and such stories multiply as the pandemic refuses to reduce its grip. While in the early days, most conversations veered around the potency of the virus and the multitude of ways to cure oneself of this dreaded pandemic, most conservations now tend to dismiss the disease as ‘Just another flu’. The apparent casualness flies in the eyes of a conventional analysis as awareness about the disease is immense and Indians who lived through the difficult times of the lockdown are cognizant of its life-threatening effects.

However, the current predilection of not wearing masks also comes associated with the sense of fatality and fatigue, having undergone painful job losses and social stigma for the past few months. Varying from “It is all god’s will” to “Nothing will happen to me” to “We have all caught the disease” to “God cannot kill all the poor” to “If it happens, it happens” to “We don’t have money to buy a mask” to a multitude of reasons, the almost universal lack of an interest to wear masks also hides an important detail about our social lives. Communities have been the hardest hit by the economic impacts of the crisis and have no other option but to step out. They cannot stay in and worry about wearing a mask or maintaining distance but rather about securing food into their stomach. In many ways, the fear of the pandemic, coupled with the spread of fake news in this modern era has led to calls of revisionist theories that at once declares impacts of the coronavirus as a hoax while also pandering fear of its supposed impacts.

With millions falling prey, there is a wail that this generation is paying for its sins. However, William Dunbar said it best when he wrote that “The fear of death disturbs me” in the ‘Lament for the Makers’, suggesting perhaps that the human race has faced such threats throughout history and those dark moments were unique as the human race did not have an answer then as they don’t have now. People in those dark days were prone to succumb to fear, the rise of a disease cutting through society without any discrimination invokes helplessness amongst the rich and the poor. This causal relationship between disease and sin is seen also in Greek literary texts, such as Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Homer’s Iliad opens with a plague visited upon the Greek camp at Troy to punish the Greeks for Agamemnon’s enslavement of Chryseis.

Humankind has time and again let this fear turn into panic overwhelming traces of rationality. This facilitates easier propagation of fake news into the community. The feedbacks surrounding myths and legends that have cropped up around the issue managing covid also border on the absurd. Just as the carbon dioxide theory propounded by the driver, more such theories abound in the markets of Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune and Delhi ranging from guzzling copious amounts of alcohol to holding your breath to “We are safe as long as we are in our locality” to stopping the consumption of fruits as fruits are known to carry the virus. The list is endless, and each country, state, city and locality have added a twist to these stories. The challenge for people working in the frontline is to sift through the rumours and convey basic truths about the pandemic and its causes.

However, as we see more complacency creep in, it would do good to understand the underlying fear and weariness that communities are suffering from. From the moment, they face a gun-shaped thermal scanner and oximeter to the endless surveys that have fatigued them to the unfortunate spread of stigma of an uncommon but not unmanageable disease and the mishandling of dissemination in this very real public health crisis.

The need of the hour is to aggressively push for an overarching campaign that involves all stakeholders and myriad activities such as posters, stickers, banners, wall paintings, murals, street theatre, songs, tableaus, announcement from mosques, churches, temples and gurdwaras, radio campaigns, television ads and as many creative outlets as possible.

As we learn from this ongoing pandemic, it will bode well to recall that literature has been humanity’s constant companion though long periods of uncertainty. And often, when a pandemic hit humankind, there was not much that could be done then as it is now, the only effective measure back then was what is known today as social distancing and quarantine of the sick which, according to Procopius, the principal Byzantine historian, was done voluntarily by individuals. In this current age, we can strive to be a step ahead and promote distancing, wearing of masks and better hygiene in a manner that was not possible in ancient times.