EDITORIAL: Pakistan suffered a double whammy this week as the new, faster spreading variant of the coronavirus was discovered here on Tuesday and on Wednesday the National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC) reported that the death toll from Covid-19 in the country had crossed the ominous 10,000 mark. Travel bans that most countries across the world imposed on the United Kingdom, after it first reported the new strain of the virus, have clearly not worked since it was still able to surface in more than a dozen countries in a matter of days. One reason for that is that the new mutated form was first discovered in the UK in September, yet for some reason the Johnson government kept mum about it till late December, giving the virus ample time to spread pretty much across the whole world. In fact, what has been increasingly referred to as the second wave of the coronavirus actually picked up speed just around the September-October period, so it could well be that the new virus got out of hand sooner than anybody knew about it and caused much of the second-round damage.
So far the NCOC, like similar authorities elsewhere in the world, has urged people not to panic and continue to concentrate on following all safety protocols very seriously. The new variant might not be any more lethal than the original strain, even though the final word on this is yet to come, but it does transmit 70 percent faster. And considering that the original version has already taken almost two million lives so far, all it really needs to do is travel faster to kill a lot faster as well. That is precisely what health authorities in the European Union (EU) have warned of, saying that the faster spread-rate means its impact on “hospitalisations and deaths is assessed as high.” This is very bad news especially for a country like Pakistan since the second wave has already pushed the government against the wall and it is only a matter of time before it has to stitch together another comprehensive stimulus package to keep the economy from shutting down all over again. This seems almost unfair since so much money was put into the first package, about $8 billion, and now we are almost back to square one.
Unfortunately, the news from the vaccine front is not any more encouraging either for the third world. Therefore, the Pakistani government should be careful about the kind of promises it makes lest it is forced to go back on its word. Claims that it might be able to get the ball rolling sometime around March 2021, that too free of cost for everybody and after thoroughly testing the product, might be too much to back at such short notice. The Pfizer vaccine is out of the question, simply because it would be impossible to ensure temperatures of around minus-70 Celsius needed to transport and store it even if we are somehow able to foot the bill, and there’s just not been enough time to test any of the products available in the market for long-term effects. So there will have to be plenty of give and take and even in the best case scenario it will most probably take much longer than just three or four months to get supplies into the country. So a more realistic timeline would be far more appropriate at this time.
As the government does what it can to trace how far the new strain has spread and contain it, while also working on getting a vaccine here, the best that can be done is for everybody to hunker down, follow all Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and eliminate all unnecessary movement. The coming weeks and months will also bring more economic hardships since the rising number of new infections as well as deaths will force the government to intensify its smart lockdowns. The people of Pakistan will, therefore, have to be far more responsible than they were at the time of the first wave, otherwise we will only prolong our own suffering.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021