Why Covid-19 Pandemic Response Strategy failed
Why Covid-19 Pandemic Response Strategy failed
All of sudden during early 2020 the human life entered into a dark tunnel of viral terror, since then we have been witnessing is vivid, scary and help less situation. All walks of life are affected, more than that middle and lower earning group of population is in extreme condition and fighting for their survival. The viral terror did not stop in Wuhan, China but it spreads all over China and reached to south central Europe in just a few weeks time. Now the terror is everywhere, including in the country like ours which has the worst health care services infrastructure and almost zero preparedness for medical emergency.
When Mother Nature is against the human gene, the unequal distribution of wealth and social disparity contributes a lot to worsen the situation. You will be safe when everyone is safe. The virus attacked indiscriminately too and many of powerful people of the world struggled for their life in the hospital. The severity of the viral attack is more to do with old age, immune compromised state of life and underlining health conditions. Majority of the virus victims are asymptomatic or a very mild affect which goes off un noticed, while less than 3 % of the SARS-CoV-2 virus victim with co-morbid conditions had to get hospitalized and even need to be treated in critical care unit.
Nepal and likewise countries are grossly involved in collusive act. During the time of emergency, terrorism and instability, it is the most favorable conditions for them to earn dirty money and even laundry the previously earned black money into white. So Nepal was also one of the vivid examples of such insane act of such people.
Pandemic Response Strategy is a unique balance act of science in art and art in science. So a two-track approach, harmonizing strategies only can fetch the expected result, namely Medical Science Track and the Quality Management Track.
Typically Medical Science includes: Prevention, Diagnostics and Treatment
Prevention:
- Quarantine : Guidelines needs to be followed literally
- Diagnostics : Need to adopt all possible but certified Technologies to
identify Infected, infectious and Negative cases
- Contact tracing : It is key to avoid transmission
- Isolation : Home isolation is risky in low & mid income group
Treatment is required to all serious cases because of underlying health condition and fragile age group. Treatment is all about symptomatic relief being a viral infection. The case study shows Oxygen Supply, antipyretics, pain killers, Anti Viral drugs; ventilators and convalescent plasma therapy are the choice of treatment protocols.
- Need decisive central leadership : timely, focused and based on Scientific
data analysis
- A strong decentralized system : totally synchronized smart execution of
top level decisions
- Open to the repurposing and
Flexible reallocation of resources : frequent data analysis and change of
strategy as per the clue received from
data in concordance with available
resources.
- Governance : Good Governance an monitoring
- Surveillance : must be vigilant and do the
surveillance
- Community engagement : Persuasiveness, Not Provocative and
Dissemination of Knowledge with the
best possible Attitude and right Practices ( KAP)
- Supply chain management : Difficult but should see all alternates
- Rapid use of data for developing : Centralize live data Analysis system
Apart from the inefficiency in implementation of scientifically proven strategy and point of actions to control the Pandemic and contain it in limited group of individual by : tracing them, testing them and isolate them till they recover, there are a lot of hoax and myth we have been observing circulating.
Very irresponsible act of political leadership, very inactive civic society and brutal civic sense towards the holistic approach of controlling the pandemic have pushed us into almost a point of no return costing us a lot of collateral damage in terms of losing a lot of lives, devastated economy of the country. It could have been otherwise and by now we would have been parting and leading our lives with a new normal precautionary behavioral changes and a lot of empathetic approaches to each other and even to the nature.
If time permits I will love to explain my view points in each major point of Pandemic response Strategy and how we failed like any other looser countries. Here I would like to conclude by saying we failed because our strategy was never implemented to be successful, may it be for prevention, tracing or for the testing.
The uncontrolled influx of people from the boarder, their mismanaged and inhuman quarantine shelters are the beginning point of the journey of the dark tunnel of viral terror. The roller coaster ride continued to gain the acceleration because we opted to use one of the worst Diagnostic devices called “RDT” and we paved the way for FALSE NEGATIVE cases to penetrate inside the community and then the vicious cycle is rolling way faster than our sluggish strategy and it’s in charge can cope up with.
Sushil Thapa
Health Quality Management Analyst
Six Sigma Black Belt
25 years experience in Clinical Diagnostics
Technology Marketing Strategy
mosuka@hotmail.com
