80% immunity rate !!!

A man peacefully sleeping in the times of COVID 19 virus.

A doctor told me today that there are just about 1,50,000 testing kits in India to detect COVID 19 virus in the country. Each kit tests around 10 samples. And these kits are not made in India. For one, we had two whole months to get prepared since it the virus breached China, we just laughed at people who warned about the impending threat. In two months our preparation was only that much. Therefore we are relying on banging taalies and other theatrics.

This virus is bound to spread and it spreads very rapidly than the other Corona viruses that we have encountered in the past like SARS etc. But unlike the last time, the death rate with this virus is only about 2-3%. But since the infection rate is very high, even the three percent would weigh heavily on our (also the world) health care system.

Now, over the years thanks to the neo liberal politics that we have been witnessing the world over the public health system has been weakened, in favor of private players. If the public health care system was strong enough, we would have dealt with this threat effectively, probably without disrupting the economy to the extent that it is now threatening to do. The world is now mitigating and spreading out the rate of infection over a period of time so that some time is bought to set our public health systems right.

Otherwise 80% of the infected persons suffer mild symptoms till the body becomes immune to the virus and that happens in the first 8 days of the infection. Therefore in India we test for this virus only if the symptoms persist beyond 8 days. Which implies that our establishment seems to be okay with a large population getting infected as they would invariably develop immunity to it.

I basically see this as a failure of policy. Not hard to figure out who would benefit for such a 'failure'.