EDITORIAL ANALYSIS : With COVID-19 ‘over’, applying the lessons learnt

Source: The Hindu, The Hindu

Prelims: Current events of national importance, Government policies, Covid-19, pandemic treaty).
Mains GS Paper II: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementations etc

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS

Approximately 1,192 days since January 30, 2020, when COVID-19 was announced as a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency of international concern.

INSIGHTS ON THE ISSUE

Context

Pandemic:

According to the WHO, a pandemic is declared when a new disease for which people do not have immunity spreads around the world beyond expectations.

Epidemic:

An epidemic is a large outbreak, one that spreads among a population or region.
It is less severe than pandemic due to a limited area of spread.

Covid-19

The novel coronavirus outbreak in 2019-2020 with the nickname COVID-19 is a new strain of viruses which can cause fever, cough, breathing difficulties, pneumonia and even death in humans.
WHO: It declared COVID-19 infections as a public health emergency of international concern and later called it a pandemic.
RNA virus: Coronavirus consists of an RNA genome and is one of the largest in the RNA family.
Single stranded: Coronaviruses are enveloped and contain single-stranded positive-sense RNA.

Recent developments around COVID-19:

There was an uptick in viral flu and SARS-CoV-2 cases, which led to the closure of schools in some Indian cities and States.

Misinformation during the second wave:

COVID-19 misinformation blitzkrieg: that a ‘third wave in India would affect children’.
- Tragic tale — of children being deprived of schooling and learning, and repeatedly being asked to mask-up.
In April 2023, school closure and making masks mandatory for school children.
- These actions not being supported by scientific evidence
Misinformation and social media influencers (not necessarily subject experts) shaping the public discourse, which was again not effectively addressed by governments.

Foundation for People-Centric Health Systems(NGO):

It Analyzed the trends and stance of influencers and experts on social media platforms and in newspaper reports on the COVID-19 linked mask enforcement for schoolchildren.
Those based out of India were analyzed into three sub-groups:
- Trained or practicing public health experts and epidemiologists (including those with a medical degree)
- Other medical doctors (excluding those already in the first group) and super-specialists such as hepatologists, cardiologists/cardiac surgeons and endocrinologists
- Everyone else including media personalities, parents and those affiliated with schools.
- The fourth group: who had had an opinion about India but living abroad, irrespective of their education.

Subgroup of trained public health experts and epidemiologists:
- There was near consensus that schools should not be closed
- There was no role in making masks mandatory for children.
Most clinicians and infectious diseases were a bit more supportive of masking, but very few supported universal masking for any age group.
Super-specialists: There was greater endorsement of mask wearing for children and of school closure.
There was no pattern among mediapersons and parents, news stories and headlines often had a tangent of ‘playing to the gallery’ of the core readership of that platform.
Experts’ and influencers living outside India were making more definitive and stronger arguments for school closure and mask wearing for children in India.

Epidemiological Inference:

Children are least at risk of moderate to severe COVID-19, so they should be the last group (if at all) to wear a mask.
- Only when everyone else was universally wearing a mask.
At The endemic stage, there is no role of universal and mandated masking for any age-group.

Global scenario:

China faced a wave in December 2022 but no other country did.
Switzerland, in April 2023, decided not to continue with any more COVID-19 vaccination.
The United Kingdom and the United States have decided to drop nearly all pandemic-related restrictions.

Issues:

Dogmatic stand’ that many ‘self-proclaimed experts’ and influencers have adopted.
- They selectively and conveniently use emerging evidence and published literature to support their stand.
A few influencers have positioned themselves as ‘super-reviewers’ of scientific studies and use social media platforms to find limitations.
- They criticize even the most robust studies, thereby misguiding gullible followers.
Self-proclaimed experts and influencers (most often with no formal training to interpret such data) often fail to factor in that no scientific study is ideal.
- The findings of a new scientific study should always be interpreted in the overall context of the cumulative body of evidence and not in isolation.
‘COVID deniers’ at the beginning of the pandemic posing a challenge.
- Now the ‘COVID-foreverers’, e., a group of disparate individuals and social media groups that keep insisting on the enforcement of restrictions such as universal masking at ‘the drop of the hat’, often on frivolous grounds.

Way Forward.

Policy interventions and preventive advice need to factor in the local context.
- It determines the epidemiological pattern, spread of disease and proposed interventions thereof.
Misinformation, irrespective of the origin, is likely to be an ongoing challenge even in the COVID-19 endemic period and there is a need for sustained efforts to tackle such misinformation.
With the WHO announcement, COVID-19 has ‘officially’ transitioned from a population-level challenge to more of an individual health concern.
It is time for calm assessment, to shift the gears and also apply the lessons from the last three years.
Considering the immense interest in epidemiology, the government should offer formal training courses on the principles and practice of epidemiology to prepare India for more nuanced responses to outbreaks and epidemics and to curb misinformation.
The government needs to integrate the COVID-19 response to general health services.
- There is no role of universal measures against COVID-19 to be enforced.
India’s response to surges, outbreaks, and epidemics (of any infectious disease and not just COVID-19) should be guided by a nuanced understanding of epidemiology and not unduly derailed by ‘social media influencers’.
Children were never at risk from moderate to severe COVID-19.
- Therefore, in future, schools should not be closed for a COVID-19 uptick.
- Wearing masks in order to attend school should never again be made mandatory.
It is time to drop the COVID-19 fixation and move on to tackle other more pressing health challenges in the country.