DNA Exclusive: COVID-19 crisis once again brings healthcare system on its knees

Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary on Thursday (April 15) discussed the worrying situation in the country due to the alarming increase in number of COVID-19 cases which has brought the healthcare system on its knees.

New Delhi: The world was slowly getting back to its feet after the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic which washed out almost all the economic activities last year, but the crisis struck again. The second wave of the pandemic seems to be every bit as dangerous if not more.

Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary on Thursday (April 15) discussed the worrying situation in the country due to the alarming increase in the number of COVID-19 cases which has brought the healthcare system on its knees.

About 14 crore people have been infected with this virus worldwide so far and about 30 lakhs of them have lost lives. Out of these, 1 lakh 70 thousand deaths have occurred in India alone. And the toll keeps on rising. For the first time in India, the number of new cases in one day has breached the two-lakh mark.

Though the Delhi government is not calling it a lockdown but the restrictions it has placed are the same as lockdown. Apart from Delhi, Maharashtra has also started a campaign called ‘Break The Chain’ from Wednesday, under which curfew has been imposed in the entire state.

The NEET PG examination has also been postponed due to the threat of Corona. The Archaeological Survey of India has closed all the protected monuments, including the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, to people till May 15.

The Uttar Pradesh government has also imposed a night curfew from 8 am to 7 am in 10 districts including Lucknow, Kanpur and Prayagraj from today.

Corona curfew has been imposed in 6 districts of Karnataka till April 20. There are restrictions like night curfew in Dehradun in Uttarakhand and Raipur and Durg in Chhattisgarh.

Gujarat, Haryana, Bihar, Jammu Kashmir, Odisha, Chandigarh and Kerala have also imposed a number of restrictions.

There are many restrictions in different parts of the country such as night curfew, mini lockdown and corona curfew, which is almost the same as lockdown. But no government wants to call it a lockdown. It is because the term ‘lockdown’ has become quite infamous.

The governments are afraid of calling it a lockdown as it reminds people of the hardships they had to go through not long ago.

Last year, when the country was under lockdown, the GDP growth rate of the country reached close to negative 24. It broke the backbone of the industries in the country. About 12 crore people lost their jobs in April during the lockdown.

The entire world suffered a loss of 16 Trillion US Dollar i.e. 1197 lakh crore rupees.  It is not, therefore, difficult to understand why governments are fearing lockdown.

The way the cases are growing in India, the healthcare system is having a tough time dealing with it. The total number of government hospitals in our country is 25,778. The number of private hospitals is 43,487. That is, the total number of hospitals in India stands at 69,265 for a population of over 135 crores. This means there is just one hospital for about 20 thousand people in the country.

Simply put, the healthcare sector in India is not very good and this is the reason that this crisis has put the systems under pressure.