COVID-19 in India triggered 'black fungus tornado'
By Bhaskar Anand
The fact that the spread of COVID-19 is a recurring phenomenon with dire consequences has been an open secret for the past several months. Several countries, such as the U.S., Brazil and France, have already faced terrible consequences of multiple waves of COVID-19 infections.
Despite this information, the Indian government not only failed to prepare for an upcoming wave, but also fell short in preventing and, one might argue, supported the occurrence of multiple super-spreader events, such as religious gatherings and pre-electoral events. These events triggered surges in infections and sparked a wildfire leading to an apocalypse. Such a massive failure can be attributed to political and administrative insensitivity, shortsightedness and a lax attitude. Moreover, the individual populace is equally responsible for handing themselves over to this unfolding catastrophe. The majority of Indians are extremely inconsiderate and often deny the existence and/or the severity of COVID-19 and behave oxymoronically.
Up until March this year, it seemed that India had managed to control the spread of the pandemic. The government even made official announcements that the situation is under control and that COVID-19 is “dying out” in the country. However, in April, the second wave of COVID-19 infections transformed the public health crisis into an unprecedented catastrophe that is nothing short of a warlike situation. Experts point out that sluggish vaccine rollout, emergence of virus variants, mass gatherings and narcissism have all created the perfect “COVID-19 tsunami” in India. At present, throughout the country, the healthcare system has more or less collapsed.
Recently, this COVID-19 tsunami transformed into a deadlier “black fungus tornado” among recovering and recovered COVID-19 patients. Mucormycosis or black fungus is a very rare infection caused by exposure to mucor mold, which is commonly found in soil, plants, manure and decaying fruit and vegetables. It mainly affects the sinuses, the brain and the lungs and can be life-threatening for diabetic or severely immunocompromised individuals, such as cancer patients and people with HIV/AIDS. Experts believe mucormycosis has an overall mortality rate of 50 percent, possibly being triggered by the use of steroids, a life-saving treatment for severe and critically ill COVID-19 patients. The recently emerged variant strains of the coronavirus appear to be virulent and cause cellular breakdowns in their hosts quickly upon infection mediated by this fatal fungal infection.
India needs to take more stringent action to curb this second wave of virus infections leading to a “black fungus tornado” and save its vulnerable society from what could turn out to be a near-extinction-level threat.
In this context, even the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates in his work Amorphisms wrote: “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.” This means that desperate times call for desperate measures. The government needs to enforce martial law akin to a warlike situation for COVID-19 prevention and accelerate genomic sequencing to track the origin of variant strains of COVID-19 responsible for triggering lethal fungal infections. It also needs to act as a single unified union ignoring individual state laws to support the relocation of resources until at least 50 percent to 60 percent of the population gets vaccinated. Only such extreme measures can save India from this humanitarian crisis.
Bhaskar Anand (abhaskar@hanyang.ac.kr) is a doctoral student working in the field of air quality and material application at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hanyang University.