Five years later…: R Sukumar looks back on how we fared in and after the pandemic
There was a quiet promise implicit in the pandemic era. Amid the devastation, a chance to renegotiate and reimagine our world. Why did we turn inward instead?
For ten-and-a-half months, from the middle of March 2020 to January 1 the following year, I wrote a column (called Dispatch, and numbered) every weekday on Covid-19. By the time I stopped the column (or thought I’d stopped it), I had written 238. My colleague and HT’s managing editor Kunal Pradhan, who edited almost all – everyone needs editing – would typically stop by to tell me the cricketing significance of the number of columns I’d written till that day.
He didn’t have a nugget of cricketing wisdom to share on 238, but we discovered a few days later, when Kane Williamson made 238, that until then, it was the second-lowest score never made by a batsman. As it turns out, the column didn’t end when I thought it had. The second wave of Covid-19, the Delta wave, struck in April, and I was forced to restart the column. I think I may have written enough to cross the 300-mark. I don’t remember the exact number – and therefore don’t have a cricket statistic I can tie it to.
I often tell people that sometimes the biggest regret for a journalist is not being wrong but being right. That was true for me with Covid-19. I think it was December 31, 2019; at our afternoon edit meeting, someone was highlighting wire stories on a mysterious Chinese flu. “We should track this closely,” I remember saying. “It’s the kind of thing that could mean the end of the world.” The comment was made half in jest, but by mid-February, people in the Hindustan Times newsroom were tracking news, data, and scientific developments associated with the flu.
For some time, till the Union health ministry started collating data from the states, we were the only ones with that information. Around the same time, Kunal and I created a contingency plan on how the newsroom would work – we didn’t close it even during the peak of the pandemic – if things went south. They did.
I started writing my column simply because it was clear to me that there would be a lot of misinformation about an illness and a pathogen that we knew little about. After all, there is a lot of misinformation about illnesses and pathogens that we know a lot about. It was a situation tailormade for a journalist (and any average journalist could have done it): it required the ability to read a huge volume of scientific literature every day (and I really read a lot); it called for a basic understanding of science; and it needed high-school level numeracy.
Like everyone else, I got things wrong. There were some misses in the early days – and a few in the later ones – concerning possible therapeutic treatments for Covid-19, but I steered clear of the snake-oil cures that some were advocating. Some readers would message every day; a few would on the rare day I missed a column to check if all was well. The most poignant message I received was from an acquaintance who said she stopped reading the column after her parents died of Covid-19 (the Delta wave). “It’s too depressing when it is about you,” she said.
I worried about the fact that the people running the show – as far as our fight against the virus was concerned – didn’t seem to be reading at all. While I was very clear that reading research papers on Sars-CoV-2 did not make me an expert, I was very perturbed that people making or influencing policy decisions on dealing with Covid-19 – and they were all qualified doctors with a lot experience – did not think it necessary to keep up with the latest research (and there was a lot coming out).
My deepest moment of despair came during the Delta wave. I contracted Covid and moved to my study. I forget the date, but it must have been around the peak of the Delta wave sometime in April 2021. Through that first night, as I tried to sleep, the phone calls kept coming. Some were from friends, others from acquaintances, and still others, from people who’d managed to get my number. All of them wanted help: ambulances, hospital rooms, oxygen... It didn’t matter who you were – hospital beds (forget rooms) and oxygen were impossible to get.
A friend who is a senior judge in a constitutional court said the only room he could find for his mother was in a hospital in Chandigarh. It might have been the fever, but I felt a deep sense of despair. Then my dog scratched on the door of the study wanting to be let in and the moment passed. One of my colleagues managed to help some of the callers. Fortunately, I needed neither hospitalisation nor oxygen, probably because I’d taken the first dose of the vaccine. I contracted Covid again in 2022 – during the Omicron wave – but the infection was milder (perhaps because I’d had both shots of the vaccine by then, or the strain was weaker). I also encountered despair of another kind. An ice-cream parlour that had just opened months earlier in the local market went out of business. On a visit to the market after the lockdown ended, I saw the equipment and furniture being trucked away. A friend from down the road called and asked whether I wanted a few cartons of Belgian beer; the local watering hole was going out of business, he said. Companies were downsizing. And people one knew were dying.
The air was cleaner, though, the birdsong louder, though, and the birds bolder. I’d started working with one of the windows in my room open; ours was likely the only office open in Delhi’s central business district in those days; and a mynah with one leg had gotten into the habit of spending some part of the hot afternoons in my room; one day a shikra followed it in.
I wanted to make this an essay about what we learned from Covid-19, but, as the essays that follow show, we haven’t really learned all that much. Data isn’t respected any more today than it was in 2020 (and governments everywhere don’t just respect it less, they’re also quite happy to massage it). Science, which helped us beat the pandemic, is, ironically, trusted a lot less; there are enough educated people who believe the vaccines did more harm than good. When faced with a threat of which little was known, most of us, people, organisations, even countries, turned more inward than out. When offered a rare second chance to reinvent political ideologies, business models, and individual lives, we have either picked the status quo or doubled down on it (turning more extreme in our views, for instance, or more unsustainable in how we live).
That doesn’t speak well of our ability to deal with the next. For there will be one.
(sukumar.ranganathan@hindustantimes.com)
