Dr Shahzad Latif
LIKE anything else in Pakistan, there seems to be no
proper policy and cohesive plan to deal with
Coronavirus pandemic. Everyone is doing whatever he wants to do and the way he wants to do. The writer wishes that there were proper medical facilities and population date so that suspects and diagnosed patients could be isolated in a right manner and spread of this virus could be controlled. This would have helped make lockdown easy to manage and ration be provided rapidly to avoid delay in enforcing lock-down. It took more than two months to determine how to lock-down and which areas. We in Pakistan, lack testing kits, thus a very low number of testing is being done which has resulted in a very few patients showing as positive. This has given false presumption that Pakistanis were at a very low risk of getting coronavirus. This further gave birth to theories that it is because we subject our population to have Tuberculosis injection. All these theories and assumptions are incorrect. The one and simple thing to understand is that number of testing of our people per million population is insufficient. As per World Health Organization (WHO) we must test at least 1000 per million of population.
If we continue with this practice, we might inadvertently spread the Coronavirus to an extent that we might have great deal of difficulty to control pandemic within Pakistan. Unfortunately, we are heading that way after lock-down was lifted for Eid. Provincial sizes are too big to manage. There is a saying, managing something by inch is synch and by yard is hard. At this stage there is complex decision making between saving lives from Coronavirus or opening up so people can earn their livelihood. Government and public must keep in mind that no one has died of hunger but definitely because of Coronavirus. People continue to die and the death rate is increasing day by day. Government can save lives from Coronavirus by proper lock-down, having properly equipped medical facilities and ensuring public follows rules of social distancing, washing hands procedure, using masks and using sanitizers. The government should work in coordination with reputable on government organizations to bring food to deserving population. These organizations do have the data and work force to implement such a plan.
The writer is a political economist and understands the importance of people working, economy moving and government collecting taxes. But we need to weigh it out; the tax collection is important or the lives? Under the 18th Amendment medicine is a provincial responsibility. It is given that provinces have failed to improve under both of previous regimes. But two years have passed under the present government, a question arises, how much system correction has been done in these two years? There is no stability in prices in the market. Prices are still going up. Food inflation is still high. Job market is still bad and getting worse. People say ID card copies are being taken and promised to deliver ration but they have yet to receive anything. People are burning ID cards in anger. It seems both federal and each of the provincial governments are working hard to control coronavirus and also to distribute ration, but hardly public is satisfied. There are reports that this ration is finding a way to houses of waderas and bureaucrats. Whatever good has been done is by philanthropists. Even the Supreme Court had to take suo motu action on this so-called management of coronavirus. This writer has been writing for past couple of years that the government has unnecessarily set discount interest rates at such a high level ie; 13.5%. The government reduced it by 2% which was not enough. There is a continuous political in-fighting going on between the federal and provincial governments.
Test kits received from China, the Sindh government kept the majority of them for themselves and shared with the rest of the country a very small portion. From the second imported shipment of these kits, what federal government sent to Sindh, the Sindh government claimed as defective. National Coordination Committee (NCC)holds meetings to make mutual decisionsand then the provinces do whatever they want to. So what is the point of NCC meetings and mutual decision making? Politics is being played by both federaland provinces. Everything is being politicized. Tiger Force put together by the federal government to help distribute ration has been refused by Sindh, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan along political lines. By adopting a proper political and financial structure of the government as proposed by the writer, these issues can be done away with.Thus have a consistent cohesive health care policy throughout Pakistan.
—The writer is a Political Economist & Reformist and Chairman; PakistanTehreek-e-Nizam.
