‘We Haven’t Learnt Our Lessons From Covid Waves’
Yogendra Chaudhary, 30, a chemist shop owner in Moradabad (Uttar Pradesh), is scared of the looming third wave and urges people for Covid-appropriate behaviour in public places
I am a pharmacist and opened a medicine shop about the same time when the dread of Covid-19 was setting in. In a matter of a few months, the number of people visiting our pharmacy increased by nearly 50% which meant coming in contact with more and more strangers with every passing hour and day. Moreover, we had no idea about the immunity levels of these individuals that we were coming in contact with.
Needless to say, I caught the dreaded virus around April 2020, when everyone was just flailing around for solutions. Even though mine was a mild case and I escaped with only a mild fever, the uncertainty about when the infection might flare up, can leave people agonised. I resumed work after the required quarantine period and only after I ensured I had tested negative. One may recover from Covid, but the immunity isn’t as robust as before.
Back then, there was not even a murmur of vaccines being developed. Apart from the usual masks, gloves and sanitizers we had no protection at all. Even when all other services were halted amid strict lockdown, ours was the most essential service of it all, which meant we have been open throughout the pandemic. Day in and day out. There might have been days where hospitals and chemists must have been the only ones functioning. It’s an eerie feeling to be the only businesses open when everything else is shut down.
While people were scared when the first wave struck, the fear vanished as the cases began to subside. The Covid-appropriate behaviour went for a toss and quite a few of them would come to our pharmacy without masks. Then there were people who were following the protocols for the sake of it. If you ask me, what I feared the most was every time people would take out their phones (to make or receive calls) in between the purchases and after that directly take out cash to pay us. Phones are anyway considered dirty as few take the time to clean them properly.
Online transactions were cool though, but in small towns not everyone does online transactions. If you remember, Moradabad was declared a hotspot during the first wave, with so many people even refusing to get tested.
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Indeed, it did not take long for the second wave to knock in. And what a wave it turned out to be. No hospital beds, no oxygen, dead bodies flowing in the Ganga. But yet, we haven’t learnt our lessons. The tragedies are all but forgotten, and we are back to our Covid-inappropriate selves. Experts say the third wave is upon us, sooner or later. And being in the middle of it all being a chemist, I am scared. But if you look around, the public behaviour seems as if we care a hoot.
Prevention is definitely better than cure when it comes to the coronavirus. When people don’t take precautions, it is frontline workers like us chemists and our families who are at a major risk of infection and reinfection. I had never expected the pandemic to go on for so long and I wish I seen the end of it for good. The spectre of ill-health looming over people day in and day out is too much. The second wave was so heart-breaking as well as scary. The mutated virus was even more deadly, and to think it can be kept at bay (mostly) using the simple measures of masks, sanitisers and social distancing.
Vaccines have come as a much-needed relief but people still need to be careful. We should do everything in our might to keep the third wave at bay and we can’t fully be at rest until the virus is defeated altogether. After all our own lives and that of our loved ones are at stake.
As Told To Yog Maya Singh
