Diminishing returns
The Punjab chief minister’s one-size-fits-all solution to everything: suspend someone. This might not solve the problem – it is quite possible it might even make it worse – but it led to a measure of applause in the past by both his voters and the idiocratic press. But now even those populist returns are diminishing. It is becoming easier and easier for the political humour circles to caricature the provincial premier. The directions of the CM secretariat are also turning out to be predictable; a newspaper reporter’s copy basically writes itself.
Consider the suspension of the chief of the BB hospital in Rawalpindi the other day. The doctor replacing him has already been suspended earlier from his position as the health officer of Chakwal. With the health bureaucracy of the province being, at the end of the day, a finite number of people, it is going to become next to impossible to find someone who hasn’t attracted the ire of the CM at least once.
Moving on, it remains to be seen what good the closure of the schools in Lahore for ten days will achieve. The dengue mosquitoes aren’t taking any days off. And the assumption that these kids are going to be safer from the pests at their own homes is tenuous at best; most of these kids are already at home at what are critical time periods for dengue attacks: sunrise and sunset.
Considering the periodic regularity of the dengue crisis, it can safely be said that the Punjab government has not been able to get a handle on every successive episode of the issue. Given the vast amounts of data the hospitals are automatically collecting, there is a great potential for pattern recognition here. Not only can the key areas be zeroed in on, some preventive methods can also be employed. Preventive, not just in the sense of the public exercising caution but also engaging the services of entomologists who can suggest ecologically sustainable methods to eradicate the menace.
Instead, the public health apparatus of the province acts as if it has never dealt with the crisis before. Where is the learning curve?