Pandemic Blues: Is The New World Disorder Here To Stay?

COLUMN/ Dr. Amitav Banerjee

The last three years were extremely disruptive.

It was not wrought by the Covid-19 virus, but by the well-meaning but misguided extreme measures by almost all governments around the world on the advice of their expert advisers.

While in the initial stages of the pandemic such harsh measures might have been justified on the basis of the precautionary principle, that is, to err on the side of safety, presently we have adequate hard evidence to guide policy weighing in the riskbenefit of each intervention that can have farreaching and harmful consequences.

Not doing so would not only amount to public health quackery, but would violate the basic principle of bioethics, that is, first, do no harm.

The greatest harm was inflicted on schoolchildren. Early into the pandemic, data indicated that keeping schools open had little adverse impact on the health and well-being of children as well as their teachers.

In a paper published in Public Health, UK, researchers analysed pooled data from seven countries in Europe that faced the fury of the pandemic. They calculated child mortality from Covid-19 and compared it with deaths from other causes among kids during the study period.

At the peak of the pandemic, there were just 44 deaths from Covid-19 and just 107 fatalities from influenza viruses, while 13,200 deaths were from other causes in the 0-18 years age group, the leading cause being accidents. Covid-19 among children contributed to only 0.33% of all child deaths, while influenza viruses were responsible for 0.8% of all fatalities.

School Closures

A more recent study from Japan published in Nature Medicine also established that school closures had no impact on the transmission of Covid-19 and had substantial negative consequences.

In India, we do not have similar studies, nor do we have good public health statistics. The latest fad is counting cases of Covid-19, and now adding other influenza viruses in that case count, the latest being H3N2.

Public health is not about one or two diseases, but the overall disease burden in a community. Just highlighting a couple of too common illnesses out of context can be considered poor risk communication to the public, if not outright misinformation.

Just like in the West, accidents are the major killer of children in our country as well. In fact, road traffic accident deaths among the young in India are very high. Over 400 fatalities take place daily in India and many more are maimed for life. Compared to Covid-19 mortality or “long Covid”, the accident statistics can be frightening if these numbers are flashed daily in mainstream news.

Over 2,000 children die every day in India due to preventable causes against the background of malnutrition. Now, school closures increase malnutrition as many children depend on mid-day meals to supplement their calorie and protein intake.

Dengue takes a heavy toll, we do not know how much, as the diseases of the tropics do not get as much attention as the diseases among affluent, westernised Indians.

So is the case with typhoid, which is common among children, and even with treatment, it has mortality of over 1%, which is far more than the fatality from untreated Covid-19 and influenza viruses such as H3N2.

We do have an effective vaccine against typhoid, which is not promoted with as much gusto as the Covid-19 or the influenza vaccine, the latter suddenly finding favour recently.

If we go by these hard data, and evidencebased public health practice, we should be more

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