06 Jun 2020  |   04:59am IST

The semantics of transmission cannot hide abject failure to plan for COVID spread in Goa

The semantics of transmission cannot hide abject failure to plan  for COVID spread in Goa

Sujay Gupta is the Consulting Editor Herald Publications and tweets @sujaygupta0832

Semantics, especially in English, has the potency to get many to wriggle out of trouble. A turn of phrase can alter perceived realities. It is the language or its use, misuse, and clever use that folks from the clever to the clairvoyant use. 

So the term given for the rapid spread of COVID-19, ripping through Mangor Hill, in an all-consuming and pervasive way is “local transmission". It's just another way of avoiding the term 'community transmission'. 

Let’s get simple here. What is community transmission? When a disease spreads within a certain area among people who live close to each other as a community of residents is community transmission. Hence even if it is limited to a local area and contained, it is still transmission- albeit- locally within the local community. Replacing the term community with local changes neither the seriousness nor alarm since it requires immediate containment and testing of a scale not done before.

It’s getting close to a week since the outbreak at Mangor hill happened.  Till now the government and its police network haven’t been able to pinpoint who brought the virus in. Did a relative of patient zero travel on a fish truck from South India. If so, how did he manage to slip in? Was the truck adequately checked?

If these investigations are done in earnest, it will open up a pandora’s box on issues that have hardy been red-flagged and actually skimmed over. Issues like the efficacy of testing and control at Goa’s borders, the adequate availability of staff at check-posts, the capacity to ensure that there are no rogue travelers, like the man from Ribandar who actually escaped to Vasco from the check post at Pernem, and now the recent case of the politically linked elderly mother-in-law of a panch from Calangute, who returned from Mumbai and went to Baga, where she purportedly attended a wedding, though it has been denied by her family.

The underlying danger in these incidents is the administration's apparent lack of information and willingness to actually let these pass without the visible urgency to bring the offenders to book. Till now, there has been no inquiry to get to the bottom of how the shop owner from Milroc Ribandar went by a two-wheeler from the Pernem check post to a relative's home in Vasco, ducking the basic checks. Why has there been absolutely no word from the government on how the North Goa Collector issued him a travel pass to enter Goa from Rajasthan after he had already entered Goa. In the case of the politically linked mother-in-law of the Calangute panch, the Goa Health Secretary said she didn’t know how this happened. While that is strictly not her job to know, the North Goa district administration needs to be accountable for this. This is not “human error" as Chief Minister Pramod Sawant described but administrative negligence combined with a dose of political entitlement, in the case of the Calangute lady.

Now we come to the larger aspect of the risk of community spread in the slums of Goa. Let us put some facts on the table collated largely from the ground level reportage done by Herald’s reporters in the past couple of years. The migrant population of Goa, most of whom who populate the slum clusters of Goa, are the dominant voting force in nine assembly constituencies, namely Cortalim, Mormugao, Vasco, Dabolim, Margao, Ponda, Mapusa, St Cruz, and Calangute.

They constitute Kannadigas followed by Maharashtrians, Rajasthanis, Biharis, migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Tamilians, and Andhraites. But off late, migrants from states like Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Odisha, Punjab and West Bengal have been coming for employment here, fast replacing the thousands of Goans who go out of Goa in search of employment elsewhere.

They are mainly concentrated in areas like Sancoale, Zaurinagar, Upasnagar, Camrabhat, Indiranagar, Chimbel, Fukat Nagar, Moti-Dongor and Baina, and of course in the Mangor Hill area.

This migrant population could well outnumber the local population if this trend of Goans leaving and migrants entering continues. Herald reported that this apprehension was expressed by at the all-party delegation, led by then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar in 2013, which met then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demanding Special Status for Goa. 

The big ask here is when the lockdown was announced in March, why didn’t the Goa government foresee a possible spread in these slums and areas populated by migrants. Here it is like a matchstick getting lit and the fire consuming the entire area. We speak of ‘Dharavi' Asia’s biggest slum in Mumbai, but there are these mini Dharavis here which the government completely overlooked during its COVID prevention planning.

What needs to be underlined is the heavy and continuous contact between the inhabitants of these slum areas and their families and relatives in Karnataka and Maharashtra. When the lockdown was eased a little bit to allow trucks carrying vegetables and other material from the Southern state, there were reports that others were smuggled in on these vehicles with the knowledge and concurrence of check post guards. Can you really rule out that  patient zero of Mangor hill did not get the deadly virus in this manner by coming in contact with one such traveler.

It is understandable that most of these inhabitants are a part of vote banks and enjoy the protection and care of local MLAs and ministers. But these political gurus themselves should have insisted on end to end testing in each of these densely populated areas.

Each day there are about 30 positive cases added, in a state which had zero cases about a month ago. Most of them are from Mangor Hill. Do we even realise that many of these residents work in homes in upmarket areas in Vasco and other South Goa towns? The spread and reach of the risk are unfathomable. Instead of scurrying to find the contacts of those tested positive now, this should have been planned better, and these areas should have been cordoned off and tested, as part of a proactive strategy and not as a panic-stricken reactive rush to identify contacts and contain the spread.

It is actually baffling that this sitting ticking bomb situation didn’t even find mention amongst so much that has been said about Goa’s fight against COVID.

It’s now a typical case of closing the stables after the horses have bolted.

It was mentioned earlier in this piece that semantics is a tool used by the clever and the clairvoyant. But it didn’t need clairvoyance  to figure those slum areas of Goa would get the pandemic given the ground realities.  

The helplessness of a government caught in a cleft stick is not a pretty picture. And it isn’t good semantics either.


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