For post-pandemic media, public health needs to be the biggest story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 13, 2021

https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/13/for-post-pandemic-media-public-health-needs-to-be-the-biggest-story

From burning pyres and patients gasping for breath to bodies floating down the Ganga, India has been through another torrid fortnight. The whole world is now aware of the extent of the tragedy unfolding. Yet, our government continues to focus on fixing what it considers to be a "negative" narrative.

A fortnight back, when the focus of international and national media coverage was the desperate situation in New Delhi, where hospitals, private and public, were running out of oxygen and patients were dying not from the disease but from the absence of oxygen supply, we knew already that if we turned our gaze away from the cities, a much more tragic state-of-affairs was unfolding.

That is exactly what has happened. The second wave of the pandemic has inevitably, and predictably, spread to rural India and the devastation here is incalculable. This is so because there is little to no reporting, people are not being tested, not being treated when they finally reach a health facility, and dying not knowing that the "cough and fever" that afflicted them is the novel coronavirus that has already felled lakhs of other Indians.

The reports appearing in the media, mostly print and digital, remind us repeatedly that the Indian health system has not folded because of the pandemic; it was already broken. Although the sheer volume of cases has overwhelmed it even in better-served cities, in much of rural India and in small towns, the existing and abysmal health infrastructure that exists might as well not be there.

What journalists report gives us only a glimmer of the grim reality. Such as this report in the Indian Express by Amil Bhatnagar from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. What he describes is not the situation in a remote hamlet but at the district headquarters: "A folding cot that a family claims to have got itself, fans that don’t work, a roof that is leaking at several places, and a ward overpowered by the stench of a toilet. As Meerut district climbs to the top of Covid charts in Uttar Pradesh, with 1,368 new cases taking its total active number to 13,941, its largest government coronavirus facility, Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College, is struggling to keep up."

The situation in UP has become the focus of much of the media attention. Understandably so, as despite chief minister Adityanath's threat to jail those who criticise the work of the state government, the reality cannot be hidden any more. Even members of his party are now publicly complaining about the dismal reality on the ground.

In Varanasi district, one of the four high-burden districts in the state, Jyoti Yadav from the Print reports that people are dying from "cough and fever" without realising it could be Covid because there is no testing. Her reports from Lucknow and Jaunpur tell a similar story. Every day new reports are chronicling the absence of health infrastructure and the price ordinary people are paying.

Most heartbreaking amongst these are the reports of over 700 schoolteachers who died because they had to do poll duty during the recently concluded panchayat elections in the state. This one in PARI, which gives us the full list of 540 men and 173 women teachers who died, is probably the most moving. It illustrates the utter callousness of a government more concerned about elections than the lives of its people, men and women who are also frontline workers.

And then you have hospitals that are built and widely publicised but add up to nothing. A report by Ayush Tiwari and Basant Kumar in Newslaundry describes how only 50 of the 150 oxygenated beds in a facility inaugurated with great fanfare by Baba Ramdev in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, are operational. They add: "There’s a shortage of doctors, ward boys and housekeeping staff, limiting the facility’s capacity and forcing it to refer patients elsewhere. The facility does not have proper water supply and Covid wards don’t have roofs, risking widespread transmission."

Remember Haridwar only recently hosted a "superspreader" event, the Kumbh Mela.

The situation in neighbouring Bihar is not much better. Pratyush Tripathy, writing in Scroll, illustrates with a set of maps the crisis that is waiting to explode in the state where there are no vacant ICU beds in 18 out of 38 districts. This, in a state that has the lowest Human Development Index in the country and "one doctor for 43,788 persons".

Meanwhile, the government itself has finally acknowledged that the situation in rural India is worrying with 533 districts in the country out of over 700 reporting a test positivity rate of over 10 percent. Dr Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, is quoted as saying, “India is facing a massive upsurge in Covid-19 cases. The national positivity rate is around 20-21 per cent, and about 42 per cent districts in the country are reporting a positivity rate more than the national average."

Just as the second wave of the pandemic had been predicted, this too should not come as a surprise. Yet, the government and its supporters continue to find ways to divert attention away from this tragic unfolding saga in rural India.

Their latest ploy is the creation of digital spaces that mimic well-known international newspapers' names, but have been specifically tasked to put forth the narrative that the government wants the world to hear. Thus, we have something called The Daily Guardian telling us how hard prime minister Narendra Modi is working to handle the pandemic, and The Australia Today accusing "vulture journalists" of spreading "more panic and despair than the pandemic".

Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the Modi government, neither the Indian nor the international media is persuaded by these deflection tactics. The stories are streaming in, from villages and small towns, and the picture they paint is not pretty. Neither can it be hidden. How long can a government go on denying this reality? How much of spin can it give when there are visuals of bodies floating down the very river it has promised to cleanse?

In fact, the government's response to the disturbing visuals of scores of corpses found floating down the Ganga and washing up in UP and Bihar illustrates its priorities. According to an ANI report, union Jal Shakti minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat reiterated, "The Modi government is committed to the cleanliness (of) 'mother' Ganga", even as he did not deny the reports about the bodies. Is that all the government is worried about, the "cleanliness" of the Ganga, at a time when in desperation people are abandoning their loved ones in the river because they cannot afford to cremate them?

The reports we have read over this last fortnight are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more stories waiting to be told even as authorities fail to count, or even acknowledge, how many people are dying from the virus. Here, one has to once again commend the determination with which the Gujarati newspaper Sandesh has persisted in counting the dead in the state and reporting the mismatch between what it has found and the government's official figures.

This report in Newslaundry from Meerut district in UP also exposes the huge discrepancy between the bodies being cremated and the official figures. In fact, the questions about the death count simply refuse to go away and will continue to haunt state and central governments. Not just journalists, but even experts such as the mathematician Murad Banaji have raised repeated questions about the accuracy of the death count. Banaji suggests in this interview to Karan Thapar on the Wire that one million Indians have already died from the virus.

Apart from the pandemic, its spread to rural India ought to remind us that the story of the grossly inadequate health infrastructure is one that has always been there.

India's health system has not crumbled only because of the pandemic. It was barely adequate at the best of times, and in many parts of rural India virtually non-existent. Today, we are being compelled to notice this and acknowledge it because of the health emergency the country faces. But each year, these areas see many such emergencies in the form of other diseases such as dengue, malaria, and encephalitis as well as perennials such as tuberculosis. In states where there is chronic malnutrition and stunting amongst children, exacerbated by the absence of medical intervention, thousands of infants die every year from something that is easily treatable, diarrhoea.

When this crisis is over, although there is no sign of it at present, we must continue to focus on this failed health system in so many parts of India. The pandemic has shown us that gloating about being an "emerging" economy means nothing when people can die from the lack of oxygen during a pandemic, or the absence of clean water at other times.

If there is one lesson we in the media can learn from this terrible year it is that the focus on public health must remain a crucial and relevant part of coverage even in non-pandemic times. As epidemiologist Chandrakant Lahariya points out in the India Forum, India would be much better placed if the government fulfilled its promises of increasing health spending to 2.5 percent of the GDP and investing more in primary health care.

The media, I believe, can play an important role in creating pressure on this and future governments by refusing to take its eye off the state of our public health infrastructure.

Showing grisly visuals of Covid disaster is media’s job, projecting ‘positivity’ isn’t

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 29, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/04/29/showing-even-grisly-visuals-of-covid-disaster-is-medias-job-projecting-positivity-isnt

"I can't breathe". These words were immortalised by George Floyd, the African American who died after he was held down by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, US in May 2020. Floyd's death after those nine minutes that Chauvin continued to press his knee on his neck is now history. It led to nationwide demonstrations and demands to end systemic racism in the US and change policing methods. On April 20, a court held Chauvin guilty of second and third degree murder.

In India, in this nightmarish fortnight since mid-April, hundreds of people have been saying these very words, "I can't breathe", as they lie outside hospitals, on stretchers, on the ground, in ambulances, in cars, and as their relatives desperately seek beds with oxygen. Others have died en route or at home, unable to reach a hospital or any medical help in time. Even in our worst nightmares, none of us could have imagined that a year after the Covid pandemic hit this country, we would be where we are today, a country that, as the Guardian put it, is "a living hell".

A great deal of credit goes to Indian journalists, especially those working for regional media outlets, for their persistence in recording the actual number of deaths due to Covid that are far in excess of those reported officially. Without that kind of incisive journalism, the government could have continued to delude Indians that things were really not that bad. Union health minister Harsh Vardhan continues to believe India is better off this year than last year. But the searing images of the cremation grounds and burial sites that we have seen these last days tell us the real story; they will continue to haunt us for many years to come.

Inevitably, because the epicentre of the current upsurge in Covid infections and fatalities is New Delhi, there has been more detailed coverage by the media of what is happening on the ground. It has also drawn the attention of the international media, much to the discomfort of the dispensation ruling this country that has wanted to project only the "positive" story from India.

Of course, supporters of the BJP and fawning followers of the prime minister continue to believe that all such reports, including those from outside India, are exaggerated, and are a ploy to undercut the image of India and its leader. They remain stubbornly blind to an essential part of a free, democratic country – a media that believes its right and its duty is to report the truth, however ugly it may be rather than amplify a "positive" or any other kind of narrative desired by the rulers.

Just as the exodus of migrant workers from India's cities last year could not be ignored by the media, including those who supported the government, this time too the evidence of death and disease is unavoidable. As a result, even the so-called "godi media" has now reluctantly begun to report some of the mayhem taking place around the country.

While the shortages of beds, oxygen, drugs and ambulances in our cities are being reported by mainstream media, there still remain huge gaps in coverage, particularly of rural India. The first few reports that are finally beginning to emerge, such as this one in Scroll and this in the BBC, suggest that India is sitting on a time bomb, that the problem of infections and deaths from Covid is far greater in this second wave than perhaps even the most dire predictions.

Reporting and images are the most significant aspects of the media at these times. Together they are able to convey realities that readers and viewers, currently locked up in their homes or localities, would not have been able to imagine.

But another side of the media is what is said editorially, the comment sections that analyse policy and performance of the government. These might not be the most read sections of newspapers, yet they perform an important function. For they are read by those who make policy and by readers looking for a context and an analysis of current events.

Here we see a stark difference between the comments carried by the international press and the Indian media. While there are critical voices in the Indian media by way of columnists who have long been known to be critics of prime minister Narendra Modi, the editorial stance of most newspapers remains nuanced and careful.

For instance, the Indian Express has been critical of this government's actions on a number of issues. Its editorial and opinion pages contain a mixture of pieces that oppose government policies and support them. But its unsigned edits are what reveal the stance of the paper. Here, even though there is criticism, it is interesting how the person who has concentrated power in his hands since 2014 and increasingly after re-election in 2019, namely Modi, is rarely named as responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves today.

On April 28, in a strong editorial, the Indian Express went as far as to state that "it took the case load to surge so completely out of control for the PM to pull himself away from the over-long election campaign”. But other than this reference, it blames the empowered committees set up by the government for their failure to meet and recommend action, the election commission for not limiting the campaigning for the state elections and the "Centre".

Other papers too have criticised the "government" or the "Centre" but almost never Modi or home minister Amit Shah by name. It is mystifying why that is so given that it has been apparent for several years now that nothing moves in the central government without the approval of these two men, that the prime minister's office has centralised power to such an extent that the different ministries cannot act on their own, and that the parliament also rubber stamps what is approved by this powerful duo.

Some columnists, however, have not hesitated, such as Ruchir Joshi in this trenchant piece in the Telegraph where he begins with these lines: "It’s best to state this simply: Narendra Modi needs to go. Amit Shah needs to go. Ajay Mohan Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath needs to go. The bunch of integrity-free incompetents Mr Modi has gathered around him as his ministers all need to go. In order for the country to launch the mammoth operation of recovery and repair needed for our survival, the departure of these people from positions of power needs to happen immediately — tomorrow is too late, yesterday would have been better."

The Telegraph has been, amongst English language newspapers, the strongest critic of the Modi regime. But regardless of the stance media houses might have taken in the past, surely it is more than evident that as compared to last year, when Modi personally took it upon himself to give out messages on the seriousness of the pandemic to the Indian public, this time around, not only has such messaging been meagre, ineffective and contradictory, but he has been absent during the most crucial period when the second wave was hitting its peak. Both he and Shah were campaigning for the Bengal election.

Given the way decisions are made in India, their absence at this time has proved costly, resulting in a crisis that has run away with itself. Hence not naming the people who should be held responsible contributes to the narrative that they are not really to blame, but that it is the "system". But these two are the system.

As for international coverage, the editorials have been scathing. Apart from this editorial in the Guardian, which clearly states that the buck stops with Modi, other international media platforms have also been critical. The Washington Post came down heavily on the Modi government over how it got Twitter to remove tweets that amplified the current crisis and wrote that "restricting the free flow of information doesn’t help public health; it only hurts”. An article in the Australian that held Modi responsible for what it called "a viral apocalypse" was countered by the Indian high commissioner there. And the New York Times has carried reports almost every day on the under-reporting of deaths and the chaos that prevails in Delhi and elsewhere.

Through this difficult time, it is easy to forget the brave journalists who have been out in the field, reporting, taking photographs that speak louder than many words, bringing out the pain, despair, kindness, heroism of ordinary people. As the Columbia Journalism Review notes, "Journalists in India aren’t just confronting a national health risk – the country’s Covid surge comes amid a period of deteriorating freedoms for the press, specifically."

Indian journalists have had to pay a price for reporting the truth, not just by way of threats from governments – with Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath leading the charge against even routine reporting about shortages – but also by contracting the very disease they are writing about.

According to this crowdsourced list, at least 145 journalists have succumbed to Covid. Without their reporting, and the personal risks they took, we would not have known even half the horror story that is unfolding today.