A retrospective on the post pandemic

While the medical science was too grossly involved refreshing the tailor-made medical intervention or to say the personalized medication for non-communicable diseases, COVID 19 just meddled in between and interrupted the whole progress. CRISPR technology was trying to edit the gene of interest, was awarded with the prestigious Nobel Prize of 2020, also modified its research to develop diagnostic toll for SARS COV 2 virus.

It was exciting to see the expeditious progress in making of vaccine, as a result, fully effective vaccine came into existence merely within a year.

The importance of medical science and technology is strikingly understood by the layperson because of prolonged pandemic of corona virus. Just about a year ago, Nepal was naive on Molecular Diagnostics, now we all can see how have we got a great accomplishment in this field of science. Within a year, Nepal has made a good progress in equipment, manpower training and technology replacement.

It taught us a great lesson about how important pre-preparation is. It revealed us about the short comings in planning right and setting up mechanism to work rightly on the plan. Human Resource Planning is the major issue as the medical emergencies always pose a challenge to our state of readiness, we must always be vigilant in our readiness to avoid a fatal “fire-fighting” during emergency. A strong partnership of the government with its citizen is the key factor here. The first most important thing is to be careful about mass communication that goes out in time and in right manner on the basis of accurate information.

By now our whole mechanism is supposed to be robust to tackle so called third wave with new variant of COVID 19 virus, which is said to be approaching soon. As suspected by people, we do not want to see a mismanaged “quarantine protocol” and chaotic boarder control system. We must avoid the situation that creates a crowd hospitalization. That really means, we again need to arrange for more ICU, CCU and ventilators. This time we cannot afford to take a risk not to put our 100% effort to make effective shield against the wave.

We are one of the victim countries of unequitable vaccine distribution, where as our political leaders and bureaucracy has immensely failed so far to achieve the minimum goal of vaccinated population, while the World vaccinated population being approximately 14%. The most pathetic part of Vaccine program in Nepal that needs serious consideration is to get further supplies of Serum Institute India produced vaccine Covishield. The second dose of senior citizen vaccinated with their first dose during March 2021 is now long-overdue.

Again, it is necessary to emphasize on SMS (social distance, mask, sanitizing). If we do not follow SMS for the glorification of religion, culture and trivial politics, then we will fall into the grip of a great vicious cycle like last time. Apparently, providing special services to thousands of patients at once is an adversity even for the rich countries. On top of that, a country with limited resources like ours needs to discretely focus on prevention.

Retrospectively, it seems that the best work has been done by health workers in Nepal. The naive manpower collected swabs in two days of training, learned to do PCR and they mentally prepared themselves to serve the patients with potentially transmitting infection. One thing to mention here about the cruelty of government is that the promised special allowances are not yet paid to the health front liners, and , this is going to be a nasty scar on the face of the government, hopefully gets translated into the upcoming election.

As we all grievously remember the insufficient number of oxygen cylinders that created havoc in the recent past during so called second wave of pandemic, we need to learn from this and move towards self-reliance.

All kinds of diseases challenge one or the other bodily systems. The current SARS COV-2 and its variants have particularly affected the respiratory system. Disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and landslides can cause a variety of disasters in human health. There could be problems with blood management. Floods and landslides also cause trauma. There may be health problems related to contaminated water and food. Corona chaos would not end without the inevitable psychological health challenge for many. So we all have to prepare ourselves to take up the challenges together that are anticipated one after another.

I urge all of my readers to make a post pandemic vision for themselves and start working on the same. Please anticipate the fundamental changes in the society and work culture, and it seems like, things would not return back to the normal we were habituated with.

I am definite about the dramatic swap in the teaching-learning method, travelling preparation, and unfortunately a surge in health care accessories expenses. There will be some dignified civic space rules that might bother our buoyant mood.