A Doomsayers’ Day Out: The Manic Panic of 1910 over a Passing Celestial Event

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
International Relations, Natural Environment

We take our leave of the year of Corona, 2020 and enter a new, who-knows-what-will-bring year. With the renewed intensity of the 2nd wave pandemic across the globe, we’ve seen echoes of a return to the panic-buying and manic hoarding of household essentials that characterised the middle months of 2020. But of course there is panic and there is panic! Covid-19 doesn’t hold a candle to the doom-cringing that accompanied the approach of Halley’s Comet to Planet Earth in 1910.

Astronomer Edmond Halley set the whole phenomena of comet prediction in motion back in the early 18th century when, using Newton’s laws of gravity and motion, he determined the periodicity of the recurring comet that came to bear his own name. Halley calculated its return to Earth occurring every 74 to 79 years, marking the first time that science, wresting control from the astrologers and prophets, predicted a future occurrence in nature❆ (prior to Halley astronomers viewed the periodic appearance of the comet as distinct and separate occurrences) [‘Apocalypse postponed: How Earth survived Halley’s comet in 1910’, (Stuart Clark), The Guardian, 20-Dec-2012, www.theguardian.com; ‘Halley’s Comet: Facts about the most famous comet’, (Elizabeth Howell), Space.com, (2017), www.space.com/].

Talking up planetary peril
With Halley’s Comet due to return in 1910, in February of that year the Yerkes Observatory undertook spectroscopic analysis and announced that there was cyanide (poison gas) in the tail of the approaching comet. When he became aware of this, French astronomer Camille Flammarion observed that the comet “could impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life all life on the planet”. The “Yellow Press” of the world seized on this, sensationalising the claim (the Comet was depicted as “the evil eye of the sky”). Flammarion’s comment and the alarmist reporting generated widespread public fear and hysteria, triggering all manner of drastic actions in response to the Comet’s imminent arrival. Some people in despair of impending doom went on dangerous alcoholic binges, one person in Hungary even suicided convinced of the probability of global immolation. In America, forebodings of doom accorded with a particular interpretation of the Bible in the Midwest and Rockies states and prompted intemperate reactions to the Comet (farmers selling off all their property, slaughtering their livestock, etc) [‘Halley’s Comet: Topics in Chronicling America’, Library of Congress Research Guides, www.guides.loc.gov/; ‘Memories of Halley’s Comet (1910) – Group Oral History Interview’, SCARC, Oregon State University, www.scarc.library.oregonstate.edu].

⤵ 1910 Comet over Gary, Indiana

Altering nature and the environment
Elsewhere the (irrational) fear of a huge ball of toxic gas hurtling towards Earth at 190,000 km per hour led some folk to wildly predict dire consequences for the planet – in France the River Seine would be flooded, it was said, it would cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and so on [‘Halley’s Comet, Covid-19, and the history of “miracle” anti-comet remedies’, (Sylvain Chaty), Astronomy, 09-Oct-2020, www.astronomy.com/; ‘Fantasically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death’, (Matt Simon), Wired, 01-Jul-2015, www.wired.com/].

In China the comet kerfuffle contributed to the social and political unrest that culminated in the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, which brought to a close the reign of the last Chinese emperor [James Hutson, Chinese Life in the Tibetan Foothills, (1921)].

⤴ Postcard, 1910 Comet (Source: www.sciencesource.com)

Art anticipates life
Interestingly, just four years earlier, pioneering science-fiction novelist HG Wells had provided what many, over-stimulated by the Comet’s presence, saw as a different omen. Wells’ novel In the Days of the Comet pictured a “green trailing trail” plummeting inexorably to Earth…the only difference being that the destruction that  the socialist Wells’ comet was going to inflict on the world was on the “voracious system of capitalism”  [’The Doom of the World’, (Vaughan Yarwood), New Zealand Geographic,  www.nzgeo.com/].

The impending cataclysm brings out the fraudsters
Right on cue with the diffusion of hysteria was the emergence of charlatans and scammers peddling ”sure-fire” remedies to counteract the devastating effects of Halley’s Comet’s impact with Earth (cf. the Donald Trump-endorsed bleach and other quackery claiming to be an antidote to Covid-19). in 1910 there were ‘miracle’ anti-comet pills (comprising sugar and quinine) and a cure-all “Halley’s Comet elixir” (Chaty). Just as Coronavirus 2020 prompted a run on toilet paper and hand sanitiser in the supermarkets, people started panic-buying gas masks while some flocked to their churches to seek divine intervention to save them from the Comet [‘The Halley’s Comet Fuss of 1910’, (Jacob vanderSluys), Jacob vanderSluys, 18-Aug-2020, wwe.jacobvsndersluys.medium.com].

⤵ 1986 Comet (Image: NASA)

As things transpired the reality turned out to be something of an anti-climax…Halley’s Comet safely passed by Earth, missing it by at least 400,000 kilometres (as it had done previously every 75-76 years for millennia!)✧ and normality returned to everyday life across the globe (Chaty).

⤵ Bayeux Tapestry depicting 1066 Comet

Footnote: All down to Halley’s Comet
Coincidences occurring during the periodic passage of the Comet has provided fertile ground for doomsayers. Edward VII’s death in May 1910 during the period Halley’s Comet was visible, was ‘proof’ to many of the Comet’s ‘paranormal’ power to wreak havoc and destruction on the Earth♉︎. Similarly, it was noted that author Mark Twain’s lifespan encompassed the exact duration between the 1835 and the 1910 comets. People in 1066 saw the passage of Halley’s Comet as a foreboding sign…for English king, Harold II, this premonition preceded his loss and death in the Battle of Hastings later in that year. The Great Comet of 1680 facilitated a scientific breakthrough, in this year German astronomer Gottfried Kirch was the first to sight Halley’s Comet through a telescope.

⤴ 1680 Comet over Rotterdam (Lieve Verschuier)

𖥸 𖥸 𖥸

the next perihelion of Halley’s Comet is predicted for 2061

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❆ Unfortunately Halley himself didn’t live long enough to witness the next cycle of his eponymous comet (1758)

✧ subsequent scientific testing confirmed that the tail of the Comet contained no toxic gas

♉︎ In Julius Caesar Shakespeare wrote, “when beggars die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”

Tarzan, the Enduring, Politically-incorrect, Pop Culture Myth of a White Saviour in a Black World

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Memorabilia, Natural Environment, Popular Culture, Racial politics, Society & Culture

⇩ Start of the Tarzan pulp fiction phenomenon

2CFFCD21-92B3-448D-B44C-002354849965When testosterone-charged visitors to coastal Belgian towns began strolling around the shops and cafes bare-chested in 2015, locals objecting to this aesthetic blight on the landscape took to labelling the offending blow-ins “Tarzan tourists”. References to that archetypical, mesomorphic white hero of amorphous jungle habitats, Tarzan, have permeated popular culture for over a century. Since the time pencil-sharpener salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) turned his hand to writing his first story in 1912, the aura of Tarzan, carefully cultivated by the author into a cultural icon, has extended from pulp fiction, to various media including comic strips, films (over 90!), radio shows, TV series, Broadway musicals, computer games and a raft of commercial merchandise𝓪.

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Celluloid Tarzan – from urbane gent to LCD savage
The phenomenal success of ERB’sTarzan of the Apes and follow-up pulp novels provided prime adventure material for a rapid transition into cinema, starting with a silent movie in 1918. Later sound film interpretations, especially those with former American Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, departed radically from Burroughs’ original conception of the heroic jungle adventurer as a cultured, multilingual, erudite aristocrat (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke). Weissmuller’s “dumbed-down” depiction of Tarzan was as an innocent and noble savage, the “strong and silent” type given only to monosyllabic utterings (“Me, Tarzan, you, Jane”).

⇩  ERB at home in Tarzana, California

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White skin, white supremacist
As successful as the books and later franchises have been, Tarzan’s character has engendered a persistent stream of controversy. ERB’s creation, from the start, was an obvious target for accusations of racism – a white boy/man𝓫 thrown into a dangerous and alien environment (the “dark continent”), who manages not only to survive but to triumph over hordes of dark-skinned peoples and over numerous wild animals. Tarzan emerges from the pages as a “consummate colonial-era adventurer” – “a white man whose novel civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals…using appropriate technology” to help natives who “cannot solve their own problems” [RJ Gordon in Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist … and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, (edited by Luis A Vivanco & Robert J Gordon), 2006]. The world that Tarzan creates in the jungle is in effect a “white supremacist Eden parable”, the books and films completely omit the point-of-view of the indigenous people who live in the African jungle (or the Amazonian rainforest𝓬) ‘[‘The Only Good Tarzan is a Bad Tarzan’, (Aaron Bady), Pacific Standard, 08-Jul-2016, www.psmag.com; ‘From Tarzan to Avatar: the problem with “the white man in the jungle”’, (Steve Rose), The Guardian, 06-Jul-2016, www.theguardian.com].

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⇧ TV Tarzan (loin-clothed Ron Ely) in Mesoamerican climes  (Source: www.nbc.com)

A white world of comfortable racial assumptions Tarzan’s brand of chivalrous “white masculinity” precludes him from engaging in sexual violence against women, but he is utterly implicated in the negative racial stereotyping of Africans, an explicit feature of the books – black men are described as “lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering”, Arabs are “surly looking”. Without holding back, ERB tells us, Tarzan is “a killer of many black men”, revelling, shockingly for modern sensitivities, in the act of ‘lynching’ blacks [Gail Bederman, quoted in ‘Tarzan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

The mystique of Tarzan: Green mascot, eco-warrior and proto-expat
Part of Tarzan’s durability as a cultural icon might lie in his versatile utility. It has been noted that Tarzan possesses an “ability to adapt to the zeitgeist of different eras”. In seamlessly managing an environment that is unnatural and unfamiliar to him, he demonstrates a flair for “ecological sustainability”, we are shown the ape-man’s apparently impeccable “green credentials” [‘The Untamed Image of the Perfect Savage’, (Bram Wicherink), Efnofoor, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp.90-97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25758188. Accessed 10 July 2020]. For Paul Theroux, who had hands-on experience of being part of the ‘invasion’ of Africa by Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, Tarzan is “in the jungle, but not of the jungle”…therefore he was the “first expatriate”𝒹 [Theroux, P.  “Tarzan Is an Expatriate.” Transition, no. 32, 1967, pp. 13–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2934617. Accessed 10 July 2020].

⇩ The first screen Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, 1918

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Tarzan as metaphor – defender of masculinity
The period in which ERB wrote the first Tarzan books (just before, through and after WWI) saw the emergence of a challenge to the hegemony of white masculinity – from the Suffragette Movement…according to Robert Gordon, Burroughs’ creation of the all-conquering jungle superhero constituted a buffer against that perceived threat. This held sway again in the 1960s and 70s when the advent of women’s, LGBT and civil rights movements loomed as a threat to (white heterosexual) masculinity. Tarzan, as “the archetypal white-manhood fantasy” represented a “refuge of sorts for white audiences”. What they could observe in the story of Tarzan was an ideal of manliness, a he-man proving himself physically in the most testing of circumstances [Gordon; ‘Me, Tarzan. You, Really Still Doing This?’, (Devon Maloney), Mel, 11-Jul-2016,  www.melmagazine.com.

PostScript: An attempt at a politically-corrected Tarzan
The talkies motion picture era has seen a string of mostly forgettable actors taking on the role of Tarzan, as well as a TV series or two and even Disney animation versions of the vine-swinging king of the jungle. In recent decades the Tarzan phenomenon has appeared to be running out of steam, although a recent entry, a 2016 screen production, The Legend of Tarzan, sought to present a Tarzan with ‘woke’ politics and more psychological complexity. Tarzan is this time avowedly anti-colonial, taking to task the odious slave-based Congo empire of Belgian king Leopold II, and displaying his capacity for “racial sensibilities” in the endeavour. Resurrecting a Tarzan who is more nuanced is still in itself problematic for its contemporary tone-deafness –  “propagating…a white saviour narrative during the charged era of Black Lives Matter” is not the most prudent or politically savvy card to play [Glenn Kenny, ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, (01-Jul-2016), www.rogerebert.com]. The hero’s mate Jane departs from her character’s standard “eye-candy” function and exhibits a “feisty proto-feminist” defiance and the film gives a nod to environmental and conservationist concerns. Unfortunately the movie got at best only mixed reviews and basically bombed at the box office [‘The Legend of Tarzan’ Falls Well Short of the Tree Tops’,  (David Edelstein), Vulture, 01-Jul-2016, www.vulture.com].

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Ft’note: Tarzan, very much “all-American”
Oddly, in all the graphic representations of Tarzan—in films, on book covers and illustrations—he is presented as clean-shaven, always sans beard, somewhat of an anomaly considering he is almost always off the grid, cut off from all the usual paraphernalia and comforts of life.  

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 ⇧ Just your average Middle American family

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𝓪 Tarzan was “the first fictional character to be multi-mass-media marketed…the growth of a veritable Tarzan industry, with “Tarzan Clubs” rivalling the Boy Scouts (Gordon). But not just boys, famed ethnologist and world chimpanzee authority Jane Goodall was captivated by the mystique of Tarzan, his impact on the primatologist’s childhood imagination “set her on a path to Africa to work with wild animals” [‘How Tarzan created Jane Goodall and how Goodall then repaid the favour’, (Shawn Thompson), The Ethical Ape, (2013), www.news.mongabay.com]  

𝓫 in the books Burroughs explains that the name given the eponymous hero, ‘Tarzan’, means (in African “ape language”) “white of skin”  

𝓬 occasionally for plot variety the setting for Tarzan’s adventures diverts from the customary (vaguely) African location to Latin America and India

𝒹 apparently he was the inspiration for future  adventure junkies – for many restless souls in the West who flocked to join the Peace Corps in an Africa emerging from colonialism, as well as for later devotees of the ongoing craze for adventure tourism (Gordon)

 

The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Peru and Ecuador; and a Southern Cone Contrarian

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Environmental, Geography, Natural Environment, Public health,, Society & Culture

As Europe starts to pull itself out of the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the Americas for the most part are still firmly mired in the devastating crisis of the pandemic…more worryingly, COVID-19 cases continue to rise and even accelerate in some countries as Latin America seems to be turning into “pandemic central”, the ‘new’ Europe❅. This is occurring despite the continent comprising only eight percent of the world’s population and having had the advantage of time to prepare for the virus which reached its shores some six weeks after ravaging Europe.

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(Source: www.maps-of-the-world.net)

Smallness helps
The picture of Central and South America is not uniformly bleak. Some of the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, have managed to restrict their nation’s outbreaks to low levels of infection and casualties. This last mentioned country was surveyed in an earlier blog entitled Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador – June 2020). Among the Southern Cone countries, Argentina and Uruguay stand in contrast to their neighbours Chile and Brazil. Argentina (population of >45 million)—its commendable performance vs the virus slightly tarnished by a recent upsurge following an easing of the lockdown—has a total of 39,557 COVID-19 cases and only 979 deaths, compared with Brazil (whose leader Jai Bolsonaro has taken a recklessly dismissive attitude towards the pandemic). Even on a per capita basis Argentina‘s figures are still a fraction of the human disaster befalling Brazil which has racked up 1,038,568 cases and 49,090 deaths (population: 212 million). The Argentine Republic’s results are also way better than Chile’s record of 231,393 cases and  4,093 deaths (from just 19 million) [‘Argentina’s president enters voluntary isolation amid coronavirus surge’, (Uni Goñi) The Guardian, 18-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].

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Brazil: COVID-19 mural message (Source: Getty Images)

Uruguay: Stellar success of an outlier
Uruguay has fared as well as anyone in Central/South America in avoiding a pandemic catastrophe on the scale of some of its neighbours. A tiny population (3.5 million) helps immeasurably but the sheer lowness of its corona numbers stands by themselves – just 1,040 confirmed cases and 24 deaths. This has been achieved despite a demographic profile that should have made it highly vulnerable to the disease: the largest regional proportion of  elderly citizens and a population which is 96% urban. And an outcome secured not by lockdowns and quarantines (allowing Uruguay to preserve its national economic health cf. the stricken economies of its large neighbours Brazil and Argentina), but by eliciting the voluntary compliance of its citizenry – and through the luxury of having a near-universal, viable health care system✺ [‘Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?’, (Mac Margolis), Bloomberg, 30-May-2020, www.bloomberg.com].

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Uruguay (Photo: Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)

Peru:   
Aside from Brazil the country in the region most in strife due to the pandemic at the moment is probably Peru. Peru’s statistics are stark – over 247,925 confirmed cases and 7,660 deaths in a population of 32 million. What is particularly troubling about Peru is that, unlike Brazil, at onset it seemed to be pulling all the right reins, implementing one of Latin America’s earliest and strictest lockdowns. Months of enforced lockdown have however failed to flatten the curve of infections. Peru finds itself in a demoralising “double whammy”, the public health catastrophe continues unabated❈ while the recourse to a tough national lockdown has further crippled the economy [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times (UK), 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?’, (Dan Collyns), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com]✪.

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⇑ Andean pabluchas patrol Cuzco streets to enforce social distancing and mandatory mask measures (Photo: Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images)

Indicators of the poverty trap
The economic predicament Peru finds itself stems from the country’s high reliance on an informal economy (reaching some 70%). What Peru has in common with Brazil—and has been exacerbated by the pandemic—is very high social inequality. The poorest Peruvians cannot afford to stay home, to isolate as they should. Many are without bank accounts and under the informal economy have to travel to collect their wages, those without home refrigerators also need to shop frequently – all of which makes them more vulnerable to be exposed to the virus [‘Latin America reels as coronavirus gains pace’, (Natalia Alcoba), Aljazeera, 15-Jun-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. Disease and impoverishment have converged in Peru to make the predicament more acute for those of the poor who need life-saving oxygen of which there is now a scandalous critical shortage – the situation being exploited by profiteering hit men (the sicarios) controlling the black market oxygen supplies [‘In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort to black market and its 1,000 percent markups’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 18-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].

Ecuador and Guayaquil ⇓

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Ecuador:  
In Ecuador the pandemic epicentre is the western city of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city. This is thought to be due to a couple of factors, the city’s sprawling slums where “many residents live hand-to-mouth and routinely violate the government lockdown…in order to work”, and because many Guayaquil exchange students and migrant workers came back to the city from Spain and Italy in March [‘COVID-19 Numbers Are Bad In Ecuador. The President Says The Real Story Is Even Worse’, (John Otis), NPR, 20-Apr-2020, www.npr.org]. The unpreparedness and inability of the authorities to cope with the crisis has affected the woeful degree of testing done, the lack of hospital facilities for patients and even the capacity to bury the dead as the bodies of coronavirus victims were left piling up on the city’s streets. In the wake of the disaster the Guayaquil Council entered into a slinging match with Quito (the national government), asserting that the government has under-represented the city’s death toll by as much as four-fifths, that it failed to provide it with the health care backup demanded of the disaster, as well as calling out the corruption of public utilities which has accentuated the crisis (Alcoba). Ecuador currently has 49,731 confirmed cases and 4,156 fatalities in a population of 17 million.

⋕ ⋕ ⋕ ⋕ ⋕ ⋕

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End-note: The hypothesis of virus protection at high altitude 
Among the multitude of worldwide research projects triggered by the pandemic, a multi-country study looking at Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet has advanced the theory that populations that live at a height of above 3,000 metres have significantly lower levels of susceptibility to coronavirus than their lowland counterparts. The study attributes the capacity of high altitude to nullify the disease down to the fact that living at high altitude allows people to cope with hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood), and that the altitude provides a favourable natural environment—dry mountain air, high UV radiation and a resulting lowering of barometric pressure—reduces the virus’ ability to linger in the air. The COVID-19 experience of Cuzco in Peru seems to corroborate this hypothesis, being lightly affected compared to the rampage elsewhere in the country – the high Andean city has had only 899 confirmed cases and three deaths. Similarly, La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest legislative capital, has recorded only 38 coronavirus-related deaths to date⊠ [‘From the Andes to Tibet, the coronavirus seems to be sparing populations at high altitudes’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 01-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].

 
<Þ> all country coronavirus counts quoted above are as at 20-June-2020

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❅ for week ending 20th June 2020, confirmed cases for Latin America represented half of all new coronavirus cases (Source: WHO)  
✺ a like-for-like comparison to Uruguay might be Paraguay – also a small population (6.9 million), only 1,336 cases and 13 deaths but at the cost of a draconian lockdown with an economy-crippling end-game. 
❈ even prior to COVID-19 striking, the Peruvian public health system was struggling due to “decades of chronic underinvestment” (eg, spending <$700 a day on health care) (Tegel, ‘In Peru’)   
✪ the strict lockdown has been less rigorous when removed from the urban centres…in outlying areas, in the northern coast and the Amazonas region (particularly bad in the Amazonian city of Iquitos) it was less “honoured in the breach than the observance” leading to the formation of new virus clusters (Collyns)  
⊠ other experts discount the study’s findings noting that most coronavirus infections occur indoors, negating the relevance of UV levels (Tegel, ‘From the Andes’)

The Kerala COVID-19 Template: How to Lead in the Fight against a Pandemic

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, Natural Environment, Politics, Public health,

When the coronavirus pandemic eventually reached India, it was always going to pose a challenge of epic proportions for a country of 1.3+ billion people, with such a dense population domiciled  in such close quarters, and with a widespread underbelly of poverty. The Spanish flu of 1918 inflicted a death toll on India in the many millions, something no doubt in the back of the minds of public health officials. So, two or three months into the crisis, on paper, India’s COVID-19 record, on paper, doesn’t look as frightening as many other nations. As at 17-May-2020, so far it has had a shade under 91 thousand confirmed cases and a total of 2,872 deaths (www.worldometers.info).

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(Photo: Indranil Mukherjee / Agence France-Presse – Getty Images)

There is a perception within medical circles however that these figures don’t portray the full extent of the outbreak. India’s urban areas are packed with masses of people living face to face, beset with poor sanitation conditions, up to 100 people sharing the same toilet in some cases, adding up to a recipe for catastrophe in plague time. Obtaining a test for coronavirus in India has tended to not be straightforward, thus the level of testing has lagged woefully behind what is desirable, eg, by well into March India was averaging only five tests per ten lakhs (= one million) people, compared with South Korea which had managed 4,800 per ten lakhs.

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Too many migrant workers waiting for too few buses to take them home after the lockdown was announced (Photo: Yawar Nazir – Getty Images)

Containment measures have been far short of perfect, and with some glaring omissions…there has been passive resistance to the lockdowns from sceptical Indians, and the ban on public gatherings has from time to time been skirted round (some ‘scofflaw’ political parties continue to hold mass rallies). Although India’s borders were closed fairly promptly, some have been critical of the procrastination of Indian leaders’ during the crucial early days of the crisis, one Indian epidemiologist characterised it as a “let’s wait till tomorrow” attitude [‘India Scrambles to Escape a Coronavirus Crisis. So Far It’s Working’, (J Gettleman, S Raj, KD Singh & K Schultz), New York Times, 17-March-2020, www.nytimes.com]. This early reticence to act emanated from Delhi. The Modi BJP government, initially seemingly more concerned with the impact on India’s under-performing economy, issued no public health warnings or media briefings at the onset of the pandemic [‘What the world can learn from Kerala about how to fight covid-19’, (Sonia Faleiro), MIT Technology Review, 13-Apr-2020, www.technologyreview.com].

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(www.anayahotels.com)

Kerala, leading from the periphery
Kerala is one state that these general criticisms of Indian public health efforts against COVID-19 cannot be levelled. The small southwestern Indian state is one of the most picturesque parts of the land with its coconut trees and irenic and serene back-waterways. Known as a tourist mecca, Kerala, population 35 million, is more affluent than many parts of India (GDP per capital GB£2,200). 20% of India’s gold is consumed here, and it produces over 90% of the country’s rubber. Literacy is nearly 20% higher than the overall Indian average, and life expectancy too, is higher (www.holidify.com). All of these were contributing factors buttressing Kerala’s capacity to cope with the disease when it came.

Local vulnerabilities to the epidemic
Kerala was coronavirus “ground zero” for India’s very first patients. Three students returning from Wuhan were tested positive and hospitalised (in all 70% of the state’s total virus patients have come from outside India). Certain preconditions pertaining to the state exacerbated the risk of disease outbreak, including a large number of Keralite migrant workers in the Gulf states, a huge expat population (working in Kerala from other Indian states), porous borders, and an early summer monsoon season (contributing to Kerala’s high rate of annual communicable diseases) [‘Coronavirus: How India’s Kerala state flattened the curve’, (Soutik Biswas), BBC News, 16-Apr-2020, www.bbcnews.com].

Preparation and planning
Kerala was prepared for COVID-19 before the onset of the disease. The earlier Nipah viral outbreak (NiV) In Kerala (2018) proved a good trial run for the health service, giving the local authorities an opportunity to iron out chinks in it. Kerala’s communist-left coalition  government had established a strong social welfare foundation, investing in the state’s infrastructure with a focus on health and education, and on tackling the state’s poverty✺. [‘How the Indian State of Kerala flattened the coronavirus curve’, (Oommen C Kurian), Guardian,  21-Apr-2020, www.theguardian.com].

Minister Shailaja (Source: www.manoramonline.com)

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Shailaja ‘Teacher’, a woman with a plan
When the epidemic arrived in Kerala, the proactive state health minister KK Shailaja took charge. With the full backing of Kerala chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, she had already organised a rapid response team to focus on targeted clusters, and liaised with the provincial councils. Kerala adopted the WHO protocols of test, trace, isolate and support. Rigorous contact tracing was employed, utilising detailed “route maps”. Testing of suspected carriers was decisive, with a quick, 48-hour turnaround of the result [‘Kerala has best coronavirus test rate in the country, but is it enough?’, (Vishnu Varna), The Indian Express, 01-Apr-2020, www.indianexpress.com], allowing them to move quickly on to the quarantine phase. 17,000 people were quarantined under strict surveillance, the poor without quarantine facilities were placed in improvised isolation. Recovered patients were duly released back into the community. Quarantine compliance was achieved through an admixture of phone monitoring (>340,000 calls and a neighbourhood watch system [‘The coronavirus slayer! How Kerala’s rock star health minister helped save it from Covid-19’, (Laura Spinney), The Guardian, 14-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; Kurian].

One of the sternest challenges, very early on, came from the district of Pathanamthitta. A family returning from Italy tested positive, but refused to disclose their movements upon return to Kerala. The civil servant in charge of the district, PB Nooh, and his team, worked round this obstacle by accessing the family’s GPS phone data, allowing them to trace all of their contacts (almost 300 people!). Nooh’s staff then tested the contacts for infection, thus shutting down the risk of the virus being exponentially transmitted to others in the community, ie, “breaking the chain” (Faleiro).

The coronavirus certainly didn’t miss Kerala, one-fifth of all Indian cases of the disease have occurred in the state. Under Shailaja, Kerala hit the ground running, before the end of January, screenings of arrivals at all four of the state’s international airports was introduced. The government imposed a lockdown even before the national lockdown was called…schools, malls, cinemas, public gatherings, were closed down, and the lockdown was stricter and longer than the national one (Kurian). Face masks were distributed to slum dwellers. Planning was precise and focused, a state stimulus package of Rs20,000 crore was directed towards the economic and medical crises.The medical task force was mobilised (doctors on leave were recalled, others asked to delay their leave). Those suffering hardship included migrant workers from other states were provided with free lunches by the state.

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Communication with citizens informing them about all aspects of the crisis was clear and consistent (“Break the Chain” campaign which emphasises public and personal hygiene). Accordingly, community participation, both voluntary and active, was forthcoming. Some Keralites made accommodation available (including vacant homes in some instances) to those in need when requested to by the government [‘The Kerala Way of Tackling a Pandemic’, Times of India, 20-Mar-2020, www.timesofindia.com].

The Kerala government’s campaign against the virus has been aided by the polity’s decentralised nature of it’s structures. The coordination achieved allows the local councils to follow through on a lot of the public health measures needed to be implemented in the crisis (Biswas). The result of all this detailed planning and effort by Kerala – 587 confirmed cases and only four deaths and apparently no significant community transmissions (17-Apr-2020).

The state of Kerala and Shailaja ‘Teacher’ (so known because her occupation before entering politics was that of science teacher) are not resting on their laurels, being very mindful of the chance of a second wave of COVID-19 due to impending factors—Prime Minister Modi’s anticipated ending of the national lockdown, which will trigger a mass return of Kerala’s migrant workers based in the Gulf, and the approach of the tropical wet season in Kerala (June) [‘Kerala Lays Down Specific Plans To Tackle Monsoon Amid COVID-19 Pandemic’, NDTV, 15-May-2020, www.ndtv.com]. Minister Shaijala has been making preparations for such an event, many of the state’s teachers have been retrained as nurses to cope with a new upsurge in virus hotspots (Spinney).

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EndNote: No time for Kerala complacency but a most worthy blueprint on offer 
The threat of new clusters emerging in Kerala remains very real, especially coming from outside, with a spike as recent as this past Friday—imported from neighbouring Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra as well as from overseas—reminding Shailaja and Co that the battle’s still far from won. Nonetheless, for elsewhere in India and beyond, there are lessons from Kerala‘s formidable achievement to be had from the state’s “nimble-footed, community-oriented, cautiously-aggressive approach” to the outbreak [Kurian; ‘Kerala reports 11 new Covid-19 cases’, (Ramesh Babu), Hindustan Times,16-May-2020, www.hindustantimes.com].

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✺ the Kerala government is Marxist in ideology but pragmatic in practice, it’s policies are moderately social-democratic, with a highly-privatised public health system (Kurian)