The name Covid-19 appears to be a misnomer as except its origin in 2019 the disease hardly found any mention in that year. Actually, it changed the globe in 2020.
If one traces the history of this disease from November 17, 2019, and closely study the subsequent media coverage, one may come to a rather different conclusion.
No doubt coronavirus is a disease, which is somewhat more fatal flu which often sweeps across the colder countries of the Northern Hemisphere. People of Tropical and Equatorial regions are usually not much affected by such flus. But in this era of global village, when the mode of transportation has become easy and cheap and tourism promoted, rather criminally, the spread of diseases to other parts of the world has become quite common.
Anyway, the western media started reporting the outbreak of Covid-19 less as a news item and more as another instance to look down upon China and highlight its trouble. There was a sense of sadistic pleasure in the minds of many people in the West. The only difference between them and President Donald Trump of the United States was that while the former expressed the happiness privately the latter during the earlier couple of months gleefully teased China as a backward country unable to handle the crisis like influenza. Those were the months when Trump was more serious in waging a trade war with China. Then he started calling it Wuhan Virus, as, if the media is to be believed, the first case in the world was reported from that place.
In all these early couple of months no western government ever imposed any restriction or ban on the travel to China as they did not take the disease seriously. Those returning from that country were not quarantined. Nor was any test done. Till the middle of March 2020 millions of tourists and travellers from the West were busy in their globe-trotting exercise.
However, when by the second half of March 2020 the disease started spreading to the West – first Italy and later to other countries of Europe and North America – not only Trump but many in the media started dubbing it as a Chinese conspiracy.
Trump was furious when World Health Organisation hailed China’s efforts in tackling the coronavirus and lifting of lockdown from Wuhan after about 75 days on April 8.
True China is a Communist country where there is Press censorship and the death toll might have been higher, yet it is a fact that the country largely contained the virus within five months. Coronavirus remained confined to Wuhan and maximum to Hubei province. It did not wreak havoc in the entire China, as later in the case of whole of Europe and the United States.
While China now hardly reports any death by the pandemic at least 7,000 to 8,000 people are dying every day in the entire West – about 4,000 in the US alone. Conservative figure puts the death toll in America as 70,000 in December 2020 alone.
Suppose that coronavirus was a part of conspiracy hatched by China to undertake biological warfare, why is it that the most advanced countries of the planet unable to counter it? Are they so helpless? Why is it that the same United States is not accusing China now for the spread of the pandemic?
As the media in the West first started reporting coronavirus in China, it was virtually impossible to blackout or underplay the news of the spread of the same disease in Europe and the United States.
It is true that coronavirus has taken a heavy toll of lives in the other Third World countries of the Tropical and Equatorial regions too but its number has largely receded in most of those places in the recent months. Only those countries of these regions are reporting more cases where travellers from the West are flying frequently.
Though many in the United States and Europe may not accept it yet it is a fact that Covid-19 has exposed the western superiority. The pandemic has in a way reduced the military adventurism of the West.
In contrast, China, after overcoming the pandemic in summer, started muscle flexing in the border with India and in South China Sea. This is no less alarming for the global peace.
So far the role of media and the government in India is concerned, it was somewhat different. While the government remained involved in organising President Donald Trump’s visit to Ahmedabad and Delhi in the last week of February – which also coincided with the riots in Delhi – the media initially deemed it fit to highlight the opinions of western doctors and scientists rather than the country’s own virologists.
While the experts of the West, many of them of South Asian origin, sketched a gloomy picture – obviously because the disease had suddenly started taking a huge toll – many viral disease experts in India sought to downplay its impact. However, it is for the reason best known to the media persons, the views of the Indian doctors were not given due coverage.
Throughout the first three weeks of March the BJP remained involved in dethroning the Kamal Nath government in Madhya Pradesh. On March 23 night Shivraj Singh Chauhan once again took oath as the chief minister. At 8 O’clock on March 24 night Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced lockdown. Thus, the entire country came to a halt from the midnight.
Though much has been written about the economic and social impact of the sudden decision to impose lockdown, the one very significant aspect which has been ignored by everyone was that March 24 is also observed as the World TB Day, yet neither the Prime Minister in his address nor anyone in the media highlighted this disease which still kills more than 1,000 people daily, that is much higher than the coronavirus. Those suffering from tuberculosis are more prone to die if they are attacked by coronavirus. If the government can be blamed for knee-jerk reaction, which has its ramifications, the media too was largely responsible for overplaying the pandemic for no good reason.
The tragedy is that on this count media persons of all hues, colours and views were carried away. They started debating all those issues on the public platform which should never have been reported.
The half-baked information telecast day in and day out by the media wreaked a different type of havoc in the mind of the people. The number of heart attack cases and depression increased manifold though the media has no time whatsoever to report them.
Instead of objectively discussing the impact of disease in the context of the climatic condition in South Asia or Tropical regions, they started debating all those issues which the western television channels were doing. By the last days of March, the media got another topic. The Tablighi Jamaat suddenly became the favourite whipping boy for no reason whatsoever. Nine months later the court acquitted them, many of them foreigners. But by that time irreparable loss was done not only to Tablighis but to the Muslim community as such.
After the coverage to Tablighis and migrant crisis, the media got in the suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, a topic to waste thousands of hours of viewers for over 100 days.
Coronavirus is no doubt a disease. But in India it became a handy tool in the hands of politicians to use it to distract the people’s attention from serious issues. By the end of the year our TV channels started debating the urgent need of the vaccine. But when on January 3, 2021 green signal was given to Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin and Serum Institute’s Covishield, a row started between the CEOs of the two pharmaceutical firms. For the first time the people came to know that these big business houses are more interested in promoting their own brand rather than in the betterment of the public health.
But by the end of the year the common mass, which obeyed each and every order of the government in the first few months, started questioning the very motive of the media as well as the government. The big question which still haunt them is as to why not a single person died of corona in Bihar where over a thousand rallies were held during the Assembly election and why no farmers died due to pandemic when they have been agitating in Punjab since September 24 and around Delhi since November 26? Now those who were leading the movement against the CAA-cum-NRC are alleging that the lockdown was actually imposed to remove their sit-ins.
If corona spreads faster during the winter season as in the West, why is it declining in India and all the other Tropical countries? The media needs to provide answer.