What ails thee?

With numbers of Corona casualties rising faster than fermenting yeast, us Lankans are being told ad nauseum to maintain strict Corona protocols of washing and sanitising our hands, maintaining a metre distance and wearing a face mask. While all streams of media are used to drill this message to all and sundry it comes as no surprise that most of these public service announcements are akin to water off a duck's back.

Take for example the Government Hospital in a Colombo suburb, three times a day when visitors are allowed to visit their sick kith and kin, they congregate at the entrance like a rugby scrum all pushing and shoving to get in, paying  scant regard for maintaining Corona protocols. Grumpy security guards stand in line marking the visiting cards thus holding up the scrum of visitors when instead they could be standing outside making visitors queue in an orderly manner thus helping maintain a metre’s distance. 

Inside the hospital, a few sinks stand idling with hardly anyone using them at all. Security guards seem more intent on checking passes than ensuring people sanitise themselves before entering the hospital. Outside the ward,  sanitiser bottles remain empty or on some days the bottles seem to have disappeared into thin air. This means that people can walk in and out of the wards in gay abandon without paying heed to sanitising their hands thus carrying various germs into the wards. 

In full view of visitors who have no option but cringe and balk instead, the minor staff of the hospital staff have absolutely no qualms in making deep guttural sounds while clearing their throats and deftly expelling spittle across the balconies and onto the gardens below where freshly washed bedsheets from the wards are hung out to dry.  At various points felines and canines line the corridors watching passersby  hoping for a tidbit or a morsel of food. Easing them off the cement floors of the corridors they saunter to the open verges and empty their bladders and bowels in full view of the flies waiting to settle on the proverbial hot s*it and fly off to spread their germs in other parts of the hospital.

Protocols on hygiene and cleanliness are confined to inscriptions on paper with hardly anyone adhering to them. People just don’t care. They are instead happy to sit and stare as the Corona casualties increase. If we don’t all pull together in one direction to resolutely defeat this dreaded virus then God help us all!

Protocols on hygiene and cleanliness are confined to inscriptions on paper with hardly anyone adhering to them. People just don’t care. They are instead happy to sit and stare as the Corona casualties increase