The new RT-PCR destination for Indians | Economic Times

When a person feels threatened, fear is a natural response. When the threat is uncertain, prolonged and unidentifiable, fear often transforms into paranoia, irrationality and a search for quick fixes. The Covid-19 pandemic is, of course, a genuine threat. But responses from individuals, communities, governments and nations seem to be strangely shaped by the pandemic of fear that has been shadowing the pandemic of illness since late-2019.National governments have placed severe restrictions on travel since the recognition of the pandemic, despite the WHO statement that it ‘continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing Covid-19 outbreaks’, as the efficacy of such measures is doubtful, while the economic, social and humanitarian effects of travel restrictions are huge.Indians are currently subject to severe travel restrictions in many parts of the world, given the daily numbers of new cases. However, Indians, celebrated for their spirit of jugaad, have discovered travel routes to their desired destinations. The media regularly updates us on celebrities visiting Maldives with photographs of glorious beaches, luxury villas and divinely blue seas and skies. The Maldivian travel sites tell us that Indians constitute, by far, the largest number of tourists that is growing annually at the rate of over 80% since 2019.If, like us, one reaches the conclusion that vacation-starved Indians were flocking to the seas and coral reefs of Maldives because of the lack of other picturesque options, a look at the faces of Indian tourists would soon indicate that all was not well in paradise.Soon, we learnt to distinguish those elderly Indians who were counting the days before they could reunite with their sons, daughters and grandchildren in California, Vancouver or Dubai; young men on their way to rejoin their jobs in New York, Bahrain or Toronto, sometimes with their young wives struggling to keep their fidgety children in leash.Others locked up their children to continue with online classes and exams from the privacy of beachside rooms. Some were working on their laptops under giant fig or coconut trees. Many Indian ‘tourists’ seemed unaware that they were sitting less than 50 m from some the world’s most renowned coral reefs, or famed manta rays of the Indian Ocean. At the end of their 14-day stay, they would get a RT-PCR test done and take their flights back to their lives, relieved to have ended their ‘isolation vacations’.Luggage is Not the BaggageIn Malè, it was more common to see younger people struggling with huge pieces of luggage from Velana International Airport straight to the numerous medical labs offering RT-PCR results within eight hours. The next morning, they would receive their reports online and rush ecstatically to the airport, and then on to the college or university where they had been offered admission, usually in Canada. There was a pair of young businessmen on their ‘RT-PCR tourism’ en route to the US for a trade exhibition, which they hoped would attract sufficient orders for their specialised product manufacturing factory to survive the global recession.The interactive and up-to-date International Air Transport Association (IATA) Covid-19 Travel Regulations Map shows that the regulations in most countries begin with the sentence, ‘Passengers are not allowed to enter….’ And while restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the world, banning outsiders and enforcing stringent border control has become an easy way for most countries of demonstrating their commitment to the safety of the nation. While Covid-19 respects no borders, governments have responded with a ‘drawbridge mentality’ leading to isolationism.Throughout history — from the first recorded ‘defensive’ wall built in c. 2021 BCE by the Sumerian king Shulgi of Ur to the wall dreamt up by Donald Trump — walls have been conceived as a way to protect the nation. Rarely have they succeeded. The role of geopolitics has always been central to the idea of whom to allow or deny entry. Thus, while the US has had one of the highest infection and death rates in the world, such border stringency has rarely been applied to that country. So is the fact that countries like Canada will accept a RT-PCR test from the Maldives, but not India.The best method of preventing a virus attack is to block it from entering the body. Drastic lockdowns, curfews and bans on inter-state and inter-nation travel have been implemented by governments and have heightened the fear of the ‘outsider’. Isolation of nations, communities and individuals has taken our fears and suspicions of the ‘foreign body’ to a level approaching the irrational.Holed Up on a HolidayHistorically, islands have been used as prisons: Andaman and Nicobar, Singapore, Alcatraz, the Seychelles, etc, islands were also used to isolate those with diseases or illnesses thought to be incurable and contagious, such as leprosy — Kalaupapa in Hawaii, Spinalonga in Greece, Isle Curieuse in the Seychelles, among others. Many Indians in the Maldives now must be as oblivious to the beauty surrounding them as were the inmates of sanatoriums or prisons in the past.As we packed our bags and requested the room waiter to take our bags to the ferry, he looked surprised and exclaimed, ‘But you have not finished your 14 days!’ He was right to be surprised, as we were the only Indians in the almost hundred rooms who were there ‘just on a vacation’.