-
Lockdown – then and now (and all that I learnt)…
Disclaimer: these are personal reflections Spring had not quite set when we locked down for the first time. We were expecting it, but when it came, it still felt abrupt. We live in Switzerland, three hours from Italy. We knew very little about the virus, other than that it was highly infectious and the best way of avoiding an infection was to stay away from crowds. And wash hands. So when we were told that our daughter’s crèche would stay closed for a month and that our home would be the new workplace, we hoped that this would be temporary. In theory, there was no “official” lockdown in Switzerland. There…
-
Pandemic & the Poverty trap
India holds the record for pulling the most number of people out of poverty in a single decade. The UNDP’s multidimensional poverty index of 2019 calculated that from 2005 until 2016/17, 271 million people had been lifted out of poverty in India. This stunning feat rested largely on targeted poverty eradication programmes in several low income states, many of them supported by the World Bank. All these programmes hinged on women’s self help groups that started out as a savings initiative to leverage institutional credit, transforming over time, into undertaking businesses at scale and forming producer companies. Since 2003, I have observed groups in different Indian states, form, flop, dissolve,…
-
SAME OLD ways to fight a new virus
This paper was presented at the inaugural session of a webinar on the Covid-19 pandemic organised by MAC INSERCH on the occasion of World Environment Day on June 5, 2020. This blog has been edited for brevity. Thank you for inviting me to this important Webinar that puts in perspective human health in relation to planet health. As we experience this historic pandemic of epic proportions, it is important for us to shift the focus away from ourselves and use the eye of the sharp eagle that swoops down on its prey hundreds of metres below, where it surveys all that lies beneath. If we do indeed adopt this approach,…
-
Pandemic papers…
We were flying to Lisbon when I noticed for the first time, a tiny New York Times column about a new coronavirus that had come from the wet markets of Wuhan and spread across Hubei province in China. Having worked on infectious diseases before, we public health enthusiasts were in the habit of predicting the next apocalypse. SARS, MERS, H1N1, Ebola – they had all been truly disappointing. “You’ve got to read this,” I nudged my husband sprawled onto the seat beside me. He looked at the article and shrugged. “Seems to be localised to one province. They’ll have it under control in no time,” he said. Famous last words.…