It was a nightmare that haunts many of us till today. The Covid pandemic that swept the country and whose lethal strikes snatched many of our friends and relatives. This wave of death travelled across the country and did not choose its victims by either caste creed or social position.
The beggar living on the roads was as vulnerable as the rich and famous living in palatial bungalows. Our entire lifestyles changed. Weddings that the local administration had been trying to limit to certain hours automatically not only cut down on the timings, but the number of functions and the amount of people invited.
If somebody had told me before the pandemic that a Karachi wedding and that too of the affluent in society could be limited to 100 or 200 people and would wind up early enough for the participants to catch their daily episode of a soap opera they were following I would have laughed off such an assumption.
More tragic and painful was the fear that attending the burial ceremony of a close friend and relative who had passed way due to Covid was not advisable as there was a good chance you could end up with the disease yourself. It was heart wrenching to say the least to sit at home powerless to do what your heart desired and quietly saying a prayer for the deceased.
As we speak the Covid pandemic has claimed more than thirty thousand lives and that includes some very prominent members of our society including parliamentarians past and present.
Mian Jamshid Uddin Kakakhel, 65, a member of the provincial parliament in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, became the fifth lawmaker to die of the disease. The same day Shaukat Manzoor Cheema, a provincial lawmaker in Punjab, also died of the virus. Ghulam Murtaza Baloch, provincial minister for human settlement in Sindh was another victim. Shaheen Raza a member of provincial assembly of Punjab was another victim.
The same day Syed Fazal Agha, a member of the provincial legislature in Balochistan, died at a Karachi hospital. He was also a former provincial governor of Balochistan. Dost Mohammad Faizi, a prominent political and social figure, also lost his life in the pandemic. The disease did not discriminate and swept across the country relentlessly till its tide was stemmed by the discovery of vaccines which provided some relief to the terror-stricken people.
The one most important saviour during this entire nightmare was the facemask. There are no statistics available but I am sure this little piece of cloth and gauze helped save countless lives. It is interesting to note that while the pandemic came out of China so did the mask and it was Chinese medical scientist Wu Liande during the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) who invented a facemask made of two layers of gauze, called “Wu’s Mask”, in response to a plague spreading across Northeast China during that time.
It was also customary for the emperor’s servants to cover their faces with masks made of silk and gold threads. During the spread of Spanish flu the wearing of masks was mandatory in the US army and as one Red Cross volunteer put it: “The man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker”. While mask wearing was widely accepted there were in the US pockets of anti-maskers that cropped up around the country.
Even an anti-mask coalition was formed in San Francisco. In an attempt to combat these groups, the police instituted harsh fines and prison sentences for those caught without masks. In Pakistan, the situation was similar. Some people resisted wearing masks and were not allowed to enter banks, eateries and other public places.
During the pandemic in Pakistan true to form there was a rush to profit from the disease this resulted in shortage of masks which became so acute that health workers took to social media to appeal for help and citizens hoarded supplies, pushing prices up by up to 2,000 percent. Many textile units operating in Faisalabad, Lahore and Karachi switched entirely to producing masks for both local supply and export. On average, 500,000 to 600,000 masks were being produced a day at textile factories in Faisalabad alone.
Businesses profited in other ways as well. Suddenly, the whole working atmosphere was transformed. The concept of “Work from home” which had been alien to most business houses and the employees became routine. This led to investment in new equipment and it will not be wrong to say that Covid despite its tragic outcome pushed the country into the 21st century.
They say “It is not over until it is over”, which also applies to Covid. It still lingers in the shadows; though a hue and cry has died down and it has become less prominent in the media, there are still cases rearing their head warning us not to give up our guard. Now armed with vaccines boosted by secondary shots we seem well prepared but our adversary is a tricky character that comes back by reinventing itself every time. Don’t let your guard down. Prevention is always better than cure.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
The writer is a well-known columnist
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