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Omicron
Last Thursday, our daughter K came home with a runny nose. I thought of testing her for covid but put it off. As the evening progressed, she developed high temperature and climbed into our bed for comfort. On Friday morning, she tested positive. Protected by three Pfizer shots, we were negative. We chose to isolate. It would only be a matter of time that prolonged exposure to the highly virulent Omicron would render us positive. We just needed to make sure we were well stocked for a week. Luckily, all of that is possible in 2022. We spent the next ten minutes informing close contacts. For O and me, it…
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the backlog of this new year
Half of January is gone and I am terribly behind with all the promises I made to myself. Most of these are half baked and poorly articulated so it is easy to get around them if the flesh is weak. But what I have stuck to fervently, is the promise of dry January. That promise will be temporarily on hold for a few hours this evening, when I have intended to treat myself to just one drink to celebrate a billion covid-19 doses reaching 144 countries in the world, but that I feel is worth it… So here’s the reason for the backlog: 2022 feels just the same as 2021.…
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There’s no such thing as a friendly fire
On Tuesday, my father escaped what could have been a serious fire accident in his kitchen. When he recounted what had happened, I had just had news of our trekking guide in Nepal losing his mother to third degree burns she received cooking on their open hearth stove. A few days before, the granddaughter of a well-known Indian politician succumbed to burns from Diwali firecrackers. And before that, the mother of a close childhood friend passed after battling burns sustained while doing puja at home. Each one of these events is so recent and raw that I realise how callous we are about keeping our homes safe. Each of these…
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The Right to Health
What do Latvia, Uruguay, and Senegal have in common? Other than very low COVID-19 fatalities, they also have a constitutional guarantee to the Right to Health. As Europe closes down in its own unique way to battle the “second” wave of the pandemic, I am drawn to the notion that perhaps things would have turned out different if countries guaranteed to their citizens, the fundamental Right to Health. By this, I don’t mean just funding departments or ministries or enabling access to public healthcare. I mean, going a step further and guaranteeing this in national constitutions. Would that tip the scales on the pandemic? Would there be fewer fatalities? Would…
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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…
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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,…
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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,…
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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.…