By Dr George Jacob
Kochi, April 21, 2020: Kerala has proved an efficient state in tackling the coronavirus pandemic and becoming the only Indian state to flatten the flatten the Covid-19 cases.
At the same it also has shown to its narrow-minded neighbors how to behave maturely at the time of a crisis.
Kerala reported the first Covid-19 case in India on January 30 and remained on the top for some weeks. It has now slipped down to the tenth place among Indian states with Covid-19 cases.
Kerala’s patient was a young woman, who studied medicine in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic originated. She returned home when the viral pandemic had just begun its death dance in Wuhan.
Since then, the Covid-19 cases frog-leaped and took Kerala to the top spot. Most cases were those returning to Kerala from countries with high incidence of the disease such as UAE and Italy. The cases were clustered in Kerala’s northern districts of Kasargod, Kannur, Kozhikode and Malappuram.
Kasargod witnessed a flurry of cases testing positive, with a Covid-positive UAE returnee who refused to be quarantined. He attended social functions, watched a football match and mingled with friends and relatives including politicians. In the process he infected many.
Adding to this were delegates from Kerala who attended the Tablighi Jamaat religious congregation in Markaz Mosque at New Delhi’s Nizamuddin.
This prompted Kerala’s neighboring states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, which at that time had considerably much lower numbers of Covid-19 positive patients, to seal their borders with Kerala to prevent viral transmission.
Karnataka refused permission to patients from Kasargod district on its southern border to seek treatment in Mangaluru. It blocked the Kerala-Karnataka border by piling sand on roads. The Karnataka government was adamant not to allow freedom of movement across her border with Kerala, thus denying treatment for patients from the latter, despite national outrage and protests on the issue.
The judiciary had to intervene to force Karnataka open its border with Kerala. But by that time a dozen patients from Kerala, who had been treated in hospitals in Mangaluru, died.
Similarly, Tamil Nadu made a fuss at the Walayar check-post. It sprayed sanitizers on trucks carrying edibles from Kerala.
For its neighbors, Kerala was a hive of coronavirus cases.
As its neighbors persisted with their border tiffs, cardiac surgeons of a hospital in Kerala’s Kochi received an SOS about a baby born in a hospital in Tamil Nadu’s Nagercoil. The baby was born with a congenital heart disease called Transposition of Great vessels, which rendered the baby blue. She needed to be operated if she had to survive.
The hospital authorities took up the matter with Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who intervened to permit hassle-free transportation of the baby in a critical care ambulance on April 14 to the hospital. She survived a life-saving seven-hour surgery to correct her congenital heart disease.
This incident, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic and border tiffs, highlighted the Kerala chief minister’s Good Samaritan attitude. He had every right to be peeved at Kerala’s neighbors and acted like them.
Instead, the Kerala chief minister exhibited great maturity to save the life of an innocent baby. He refused to dabble in petty politicking and procedural wrangles.
That he chose not to toe an eye-for-an-eye policy with his not-so-friendly neighbors speaks volumes of the large-heartedness and laudable humanitarian quality of an Indian state, worthily called ‘God’s own Country.’
Along with an efficient council of ministers and administrators, the chief minister helped Kerala to become the first Indian state to flatten the Covid-19 cases and become a role model for the world.
This was achieved through uncompromising and aggressive testing, contact tracing, quarantining and treating positive cases and their contacts and ensuring near-total observance of the national lockdown.