Corona Resurgence Is A National Emergency, Wake Up & Act Swiftly & Decisively 

By M.M. Janapriya –OCTOBER 31, 2020

Dr. M.M. Janapriya

Being a senior medical professional and a concerned citizen studying and following the flow and ebb of the Corona stream, in my beloved motherland I am greatly perturbed by the way Corona raised it’s ugly head again and how this surge is being managed at the moment. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that there is indeed community spread now. Even though the health authorities and the media are making a valiant attempt to connect the hundreds of cases scattered over most of the country to one or another of the existing clusters they have failed in style according to a PHI who came on Ada Derana TV on the 26th October 2020.

This is a very serious matter indeed and worse is the fact that the health authorities have been economical with the truth. Please watch the clip here from 6.29 minutes to 6.51 minutes. This man is an apology to a proper head of a very important preventive health Department. Listen to him carefully. The journalist is asking “Hand on heart can you say that there is no community spread of this disease at the moment? The doctor says “Yes of course I can say there is no community spread as at present. There is no necessity for us to hide such a thing because community spread is a situation where we cannot link one patient to another. As at present only 90.7% of the allotted bed capacity has been utilized. Ten percent of the beds are still available for use.” He is paradoxically referring to the measly 10% of Corona beds left as if it was 90%. This man’s reply is completely illogical, incoherent and incomprehensible to most of us proper medical doctors. 

On the same clip the Public Health Inspector comes on next and says “ Covid 19 resurgence that has occurred in relation to Divulapitiya and Minuwangoda also called the second wave has got to a very unfortunate level by now. Together with the sub-cluster recorded in Peliyagoda, cases connected with this resurgence are being reported from all over Sri Lanka. Also at this moment in time several cases whose source of infection cannot be determined are being reported from parts of Sri Lanka. Therefore the situation in the country is dire.” Please watch this video between 6.53 minutes to 7.34 minutes. 

The doctor clearly is holding back the truth the question being is he doing it at his own volition or is he being a puppet of someone or indeed is he genuinely incapable of analyzing the situation and coming out with a scientific inference? If any of these is the case he should respectably resign from his job and pave way for a better person to come in. Also it is evident from the recent happenings that the special Presidential task force headed by the Army (ironically not the head of the health sector) which, up until now seems to have done a sterling job, has been caught napping.     

What happened and how it happened

Friends, Colombians, Countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury mother Lanka, not to praise her.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with my darling mother. The noble Brandics

Hath told you mother Lanka a woman of ill fame:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath she answer’d it. 

Here, under leave of Brandics and the Rest–

For Brandics is an honourable organization;

So are they all, all honourable men–

Come I to speak in mother Lanka’s funeral.

She was my darling mother, who gave unconditional love to me:

But Brandics says she was a woman of ill fame;

And Brandics is an honourable organization.

It hath brought many a kill home to Colombo

Whose Dollars did some coffers fill:

Did this make Brandcs seem ‘untouchable’

When we, the poor cried, mother Lanka hath wept:

A woman of ill fame should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brandics says she was a woman of ill fame;

And Brandics is an honourable organization.

(Might be worth listening to this Mark Antony funeral oration by one and only Charlton Heston in the film Julius Caesar. I watched this as a 3rd year medical student on one of the few 70mm screens in the country at that time at the Odeon theatre, Kandy.) 

This is a summation of the events that led to the most recent Sri Lankan Covid-19 debacle in which some powerful business people must have felt that the nation was an expandable lot. Also this poetic narration might give the confused Sri Lankan public an opportunity to delineate who Mark Antony was and who indeed was Brutus. SARS COV-2 is having a field day here on Sri Lankan soil courtesy utter and miserable mismanagement of the infection by the special presidential task force in which subservient doctors play either the second or third fiddle.

From what is happening around us it is obvious even to a second standard school child that 

Corona is everywhere. The “test little trace with passion and isolate with a vengeance” strategy 

of the task force has been defeated hands down. They are still being commandeered by the 

Army and the learned (or not so learned) doctors seem to be just toeing the line. The 

description below describes it all. With apologies to Lord Tennyson, 

“Forward, the Lankan Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the Nation knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Dragged the unsuspecting nation.

Corona to right of them,

Corona to left of them,

Corona in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with droplets and spray,

Unwillingly they were dragged,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Dragged the hapless nation.

This is the current situation. Like in ‘Sama Jathakaya’ we will defer investigating how this came about for the moment and get on with what remedial measures should be called in to action in order to resurrect Sri Lanka and unlike in ‘Sama Jathakaya’ we will pressurize the government to bring the culprits to books once the dust settles.

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