Actor Shreya Dhanwanthary isn’t just angry, but flustered with the continued silence on government’s part about the country’s weak medical infrastructure, which resulted in numerous deaths and widespread suffering during the second wave of Covid-19 crisis.
“My family and I were aware that the virus isn’t going to vanish. So, the second wave didn’t completely come as a surprise. But what has been shocking is the way it was handled and how unprepared we seem to have been,” Dhanwanthary rues.
With the steep rise in the number of cases in March, our failure to handle something of that magnitutde also came to the fore.
“Even today, we haven’t had anyone come and talk about the lack of medical infrastructure and facilities. Not a single person has come up and said that, Yes, you’re right. We screwed up.Let’s do better. We will do better’. All we’ve heard is people assign blame and point fingers,” she laments, calling it rather “childish” to see adults, “especially people who we’ve entrusted with power, to behave this way.
As a matter of fact, the actor opines that health infrastructure has always been a weak point of the country, from the presence of “quack doctors, egregious amounts of bills, availability of medicines that put people in harm to capitalist manipulations”.
Dhanwanthary, 32, elaborates, “It has been failing in so many other ways. Just because it’s the information age, we’ve come to know about it. Just because it has affected us, we’re noticing, and talking about it. But it has been failing the villages and tier 2 cities for many years. It has never been there for them.”
The Scam: 1992 and The Family Man actor goes on to slam the “faltered and biased” vaccination registration process. “It’s so unfair. There are so many people who don’t have the information about it. The app is not made for people who’re differently abled. There’s also a big disparity against people who can’t read and write English,” she points out.
All this will result in less number of people getting vaccinated, which brings the fear of a third wave of the pandemic.
“We’re not going to be able to avoid a third way until the whole country is vaccinated. It doesn’t matter if I get my two shots,” muses the actor.
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