Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Tamil journalist attacked in Kilinochchi, despite military enforced curfew

31 March 2020

A Tamil journalist in Kilinochchi was attacked by a group of unknown persons at his office yesterday, even as Sri Lanka’s security forces patrolled the streets and enforced a curfew in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak.

Nadarasalingam Thusanth was at his office when a group of unman persons burst in began to attack him with swords.

The attack is the latest incident, in what has been a worrying rise in intimidation and threats against Tamil journalists and human rights defenders. The Sri Lankan security forces have reportedly been involved in the intimidation, and have a deadly record of murdering those that speak out against rights abuses.

It comes even though Sri Lankan security forces enacted a curfew across the island, with the police warning that those found to have broken curfew would be detained. More than 500 people have been arrested in the last 24 hours, and more than 7,000 in total as the curfew was enforced.

Gotabaya pardons Sunil: Why?

The erosion of the principle of separation of powers, an important pillar of democracy, started in Sri Lanka long before Gotabaya Rajapaksa came to power. Now, in the hands of an authoritarian GR, that erosion seems to have reached a new low

Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s immediate predecessor Maithripala Sirisena twice granted pardons, first to a Buddhist priest imprisoned for contempt of court, and next, to a murderer sentenced to death for killing a Swedish teenager in 2005

Wednesday, 1 April 2020

At a time when the entire population of Sri Lanka and the whole world is preoccupied with finding the means to escape with minimum damage from the deadly effects of a health and economic crises, caused by COVID-19, also termed as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus by Epoch Times, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR) has picked this moment of despair and despondence to grant a special pardon to an Army butcher, Sunil Ratnayake.

Ratnayake, a former staff sergeant, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2015 after a 13-year trial, for murdering eight Tamil civilians including four children in Mirusuvil on 19 December 2000. This pardon is mindboggling to say the least, and deservingly met unreserved condemnation from all right-minded individuals and institutions, both nationally as well as internationally. It is not only an insult to the families and the community of the butcher’s victims, but also a blatant interference with and callous disregard to the country’s Judiciary.

The erosion of the principle of separation of powers, an important pillar of democracy, started in Sri Lanka long before GR came to power. GR’s immediate predecessor Maithripala Sirisena for example, twice granted pardons, first to a Buddhist priest imprisoned for contempt of court, and next, to a murderer sentenced to death for killing a Swedish teenager in 2005. Now, in the hands of an authoritarian GR, that erosion seems to have reached a new low.

His authoritarian measures in handling the COVID-19 calamity, although should have started a few weeks earlier, did, no doubt, receive kudos even from his opponents. Compared to her neighbours Sri Lanka has done well so far. Let us hope that the country would come out of this pandemic with the minimum damage. So, why did GR decide to tarnish his reputation by pardoning a convicted murderer?

One could think of two possible reasons, one political and the other personal. Politically, GR is desperate for his clan’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) led Sri Lanka Nidhas Podujana Sandhanaya (SLNPS) to win the forthcoming General Election with a two-third majority. That majority would guarantee him an opportunity to radically revise, if not totally abolish, the current constitution with its controversial 19th Amendment. He has been complaining for long how that amendment is restricting his ability and willingness to transform Sri Lanka into a nation of “prosperity and splendour”.

GR’s ultimate goal is to be an all-powerful executive president, as originally envisioned by JR. From an authoritarian position GR would emerge as a dictatorial president. This is why he allowed nominations to continue uninterrupted amidst the spread of the coronavirus. He would love to have the election as soon as possible with less opportunity for the opposition to mount any consolidated campaign.

GR is fully aware of and openly acknowledged the fact that he became a President solely with the backing of Buddhist supremacists. It was their money and campaigning that swayed Sinhala voters to elect him. Even though none of these supremacists now clamoured for the release of Ratnayake, GR’s unilateral interference and meddling with judiciary would have certainly gone a long way to pleasing his backers.

As he already announced during the presidential campaign that he would release all those Army and Police personnel languishing in prison on trumped-up charges, more such pardons could be expected from him in the future. Certainly to the supremacists, GR has proved his mettle by the one single and daring act of freeing Ratnayake.

Recently, there was some grumbling and dissatisfaction among a group of maverick monks that the GR-MR duumvirate was not going far enough towards creating a Sinhala Buddhist polity and economy and was breaking some promises it made earlier. These monks have also formed a new far right political party, Ape Jana Balaya Pakshaya (AJBP). GR is trying his best to thwart their attempt and keep intact the Sinhala Buddhist vote bank within the control of SLNPS. Thus, there is politics behind Ratnayake’s release.

Besides, there may be a personal reason behind that pardon. It arises from a feeling of guilt. After all, Ratnayake and other army and police personnel who are locked up in prison are not the architects of their crimes but acted as instruments and carried out orders from a chain of command. At the top of that chain was Gotabaya himself. It was ‘Gota’s War,’ as captioned by Chandraprema, and it was Gotabaya who masterminded how that war was to be fought and won. Therefore why should the architect remain free and become president of the country while the ones who carried out orders be punished? This question must have pricked Gotabaya’s conscience and made up his resolve to free all of them. Ratnayake is his first choice and beneficiary.

The Tamil community of course would be hurt by the President’s actions. To GR, however, it is not a problem politically, because very few Tamils would vote for SLNPS. He has also decided already that in his modelled Sri Lanka of ‘prosperity and splendour’, Tamils would be excluded politically if not economically; and, in the eyes of the supremacist backers, Tamils as well as Muslims are not the owners of this country, and therefore they are simply disposables.

(The writer is attached to the School of Business and Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia.)

Power to pardon another tool against Tamils in Sri Lanka - Adayaalam

31 March 2020

The power to pardon as used in Sri Lanka is just another way the State arbitrarily discriminates against Tamils, a Jaffna-based think-tank has said. In a statement condemning the release of a Sri Lankan soldier Sunil Ratnayake, convicted of massacring Tamils, the Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research said the route to justice must be an international process.

“The conviction of Ratnayake was a rare exception to the rule of impunity for crimes committed by State forces in Sri Lanka and his pardon is a reminder that even those rare exceptions are not permitted by the ethnocratic state,” the organisation said.

“At the time of the massacre, Ratnayake was a member of the reconnaissance unit attached to the Gajaba regiment of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. Both President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the Defence Secretary Kamal Gunaratne were initial members of the Gajaba regiment. Reconnaissance units of the Sri Lankan Army were well known for their atrocities and the Mirusuvil massacre was a textbook example.”

“The prosecution of Sunil Ratnayake managed to miraculously wade through the many pitfalls of the system of administration of justice in Sri Lanka including: a) the political unwillingness of successive Governments of Sri Lanka to prosecute soldiers for crimes committed against the Tamil people; b) the lack of independence of the Attorney General's Department; and c) the lack of willingness to investigate crimes against Tamil civilians by the police. Many other cases failed because of the combination of these factors including the Kumarapuram massacre, the Visvamadu gang rape case, the Trinco Five massacre and many others where there was no prosecution even. Mirusuvil was a rare exception to this series of acquittals and even then Ratnayake’s trial took 13 years to conclude. Ratnayake’s conviction was due in large part to the clear and credible testimony of an eyewitness to the massacre who spontaneously identified the guilty soldiers shortly after the crime. The conviction was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in April 2019 and was a long overdue moment of justice for the four families of those killed in the massacre. It is this rare exception that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has chosen to erase through this pardon.”

“The power to pardon as used in Sri Lanka is just another way the State arbitrarily discriminates against Tamils. President Rajapaksa reportedly has relied on Article 34(1) of the Constitution to issue the pardon but has failed to produce the necessary reports and advice from relevant ministries required by the provision. Instead, Rajapaksa continues a long line of arbitrary and politicized presidential pardons that reinforce the selective application of the rule of law depending on one's ethnic identity in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Presidents have time and again refused pleas for clemency from families of Tamil convicts under the Prevention of Terrorism Act including most recently President Sirisena's refusal to consider Satchithanandan Anathasuthakaran's plea for clemency after his wife passed away and his daughter pleaded for her father, who had been paroled to attend the funeral, to be released.”

“Ratnayake’s pardon comes at a time when the world is overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is no coincidence. The Sri Lankan Government has disproportionately militarised its response to the crisis and it is no wonder they would engage in other actions to be seen to be protecting the military in parallel. The COVID-19 Task Force, which should be led by public health experts, is instead headed by the country's Army Commander Shavendra Silva, a credibly accused war criminal who is named in UN reports and is banned from entry to the United States. Almost all other countries have entrusted leadership of their response to public health professionals, who as the situation escalates may deploy military as necessary, but not be lead by them. But in Sri Lanka, there are new reports every day as this pandemic continues of ex-military personnel being appointed to important positions in the response against the virus. The pardon of Ratnayake in the context of this highly militarised environment combined with the unconditional respect and admiration that the military enjoys from the majority Sinhala Buddhist community in Sri Lanka is simply President Rajapaksa consolidating an elected military dictatorship in Sri Lanka.”

“For over a decade, Tamil victims of the Sri Lankan state’s crimes during and after the armed conflict have had their calls for justice fall on deaf ears, and endured the pain of seeing the perpetrators of atrocities valorised and promoted by the Sri Lankan government. Throughout this time, the Tamil community has repeatedly pointed to the deep and structural unwillingness within the Sri Lankan state to fairly and credibly prosecute atrocity crimes committed by the military. Over the last year alone, an accused war criminal has been made commander of the Army, the government has withdrawn from the co-sponsorship of the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 process, and now the President has pardoned one of the only soldiers ever convicted for crimes against Tamils. We urge the international community to at least now set in motion the process for international criminal justice – victims have waited long enough.”

See here for full statement.

If we did not have our rice stocks..... - EDITORIAL

1 April 2020

Calamities and crises have the ability to add rationality and sanity to otherwise capricious human mind. They awaken men to the reality and that nothing else but life itself is the most precious thing in life. It’s not that posh car or the highflying top job or that much awaited cruise to Alaska. What you thought necessary all these years out of greed, is now redundant. Your social status or prestige hardly matters. Being alive and breathing is the most important thing in life. It’s simple healthy living with family that matters.

For centuries, if not millennia, right-thinking men took pains to drive this point home. However, the overambitious and the greedy stifled their voices and got the human race into a vicious cycle of instability and greed. The consumerist agenda urged people to fulfil their greed at any cost instead of managing them.
As Coronavirus or COVID-19 rages the world, the informed people are recalling the wise words by philosophers, academics, economists and others, which the human race have ignored all these years only to fall into the depths of misery.

There is a long list of thinkers. Among the many names that come to mind is E. F. Schumacher with his iconic book “The Small is Beautiful”. Published in 1973, the book by this German-born British economist went on to expose the fundamental flaws of the modern western civilization and its economies and urged the world to replace it by more self-sufficient, manageable systems, which have average man’s happiness in the forefront. Among his many proposals was a suggestion to the Buddhist countries to go with what he called ‘Buddhist Economics”, which he saw as the ideal model. Schumacher lamented that the Buddhist nations had started following the alien western model which is based on economic liberalization that had proven to be a massive failure, instead.

"Despite this pathetic state of affairs, some hundreds of thousands of determined farmers toiled on. Thanks to them today, though the country is locked down, still there is enough rice for a few more months"

“……therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant people is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale,” Schumacher argued in his book.
Nothing better could have been suggested to an island nation like Sri Lanka which realized the importance of food security belatedly. In fact it is in the process of figuring it during this phase of the coronavirus epidemic.
Till two weeks ago, for nearly four decades or so, political leaders happily imported rice citing the high cost of production here. Farmers were neglected and hundreds of thousands of paddy lands were abandoned due to poor patronage by consecutive regimes. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) continued to harp on the need for food security for governments here. But nothing worked.

Despite this pathetic state of affairs, some hundreds of thousands of determined farmers toiled on. Thanks to them today, though the country is locked down, still there is enough rice for a few more months. It is anybody’s guess as to what would have happened, had the remaining farmers too given up agriculture. With no ships coming, Sri Lanka would have been forced to starve!
It is high time the rulers realize their mandatory duty towards farmers. There is no other option left for us, but to be self-sufficient and if possible, make Sri Lanka the ‘Granary of the East’ once again.

Editorial: Pardoning a mass murderer - Sri Lanka amidst a pandemic

29 March 2020

As states around the world tried to contain a global pandemic last week, the Sri Lankan government made time once more to highlight its disdain for human rights. Sri Lanka's president pardoned Sunil Ratnayake, the only soldier convicted for the brutal Mirusivil massacre, where eight Tamil civilians had their throats slashed and bodies dumped in a mass grave. He is one of only a handful of soldiers that have ever been convicted throughout Sri Lanka’s torturous history of mass atrocities. And now, despite overwhelming opposition by Tamils, human rights activists, the UN and diplomats, an executive pardon leaves Ratnayake a free man, praised by many in the south of the island for his actions. His pardon cements the climate of impunity in Sri Lanka which has repeatedly demonstrated that only a fully internationalised accountability mechanism can deliver justice for victims of the island’s deeply violent ethnocracy.

After more than a decade through Sri Lanka’s deeply biased legal system, victims of the Mirusivil finally saw a glimmer of justice when the Supreme Court confirmed Ratnayake's conviction and sentenced him to death in 2015. Indeed, whilst the other soldiers involved walked free, his sentence had been held up by some as a reason to restore faith in Sri Lanka’s domestic mechanisms. The current regime though has reinforced what it, and others before it, had already made abundantly clear. Sri Lanka will never prosecute soldiers for crimes committed against Tamils.

Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, states around the world have been urged to ensure that prisoners are kept safe, and the most vulnerable released to help prevent uncontrollable outbreaks. Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, however did not have public health concerns in mind when pardoning this soldier. Instead, he used the cover of the outbreak to carry out this move long promised to his Sinhala nationalist electoral base. In the meantime, inmates in Anuradhapura prison were killed while protesting around coronavirus concerns and dozens of Tamil political prisoners continue to languish in detention.

This should not be surprising and is certainly not new. Sri Lanka's current president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a credibly accused war criminal himself, has long pledged never to prosecute soldiers for rights abuses, rejecting a UN Human Rights Council resolution on accountability just last month. In doing so, he echoes the same Sinhala nationalist sentiment of those before him. For decades, under both of Sri Lanka’s major parties, crimes against Tamils have gone unpunished. Only last year, four Sri Lankan soldiers sentenced to the gang rape of a Tamil woman were acquitted with no opposition from the Sinhala polity. Even this week, whilst Tamil parties and organisations across the political spectrum decried the pardon, not a single Sinhala party has condemned the move. Instead, many virulently Sinhala nationalist voices across the south have praised it. A decade after the armed conflict, there has clearly been no reconciliation. There has been only the entrenchment of a racist ideology that allows murderers and rapists to walk free, and continue to be praised as ‘war heroes’.

The outlook for the island is now bleaker than ever. Recent months, and weeks, in particular, have made clear the path Sri Lanka will continue to travel down. Since taking office in November, Rajapaksa has ramped up the militarisation of various state institutions, with the coronavirus pandemic seized as an opportunity to further that. The Sri Lankan military has led what should be a public health response with Shavendra Silva, a commander who oversaw war crimes and explicitly named in the UN's OISL report, at the head of it. On the island, perpetrators of rights abuses are repeatedly rewarded.

Sri Lanka has rebuked any goodwill lent to it from the international community. It has proved time and again that it will not deliver justice, and if left unchecked, the state will only continue to reverse any slender gains in democracy and civil rights that may have been made since the end of the armed conflict. There is now only one way forward. The international community must finally heed the call that Tamil victims have consistently made since 2009 and lay the path for a fully international justice mechanism. Without it, Sri Lanka’s ethnocracy will become more illiberal, more militant and even more violent.

The Challenge Of Managing The Corona Crisis Trauma: Religion Has A Positive Role To Play!

By Mohamed Harees –APRIL 1, 2020

Lukman Harees

This Coronavirus pandemic is a disaster of seismic magnitude of our times; a world-shattering event whose far-ranging consequences cannot be fathomed yet. Perhaps more than any disease in living memory, it chimes with our society’s fears. If ever we needed reminding that we live in an interconnected world, the novel corona virus has brought that home. It is thus a test not only of our healthcare systems and mechanisms for responding to infectious diseases, but also of our ability to work together as a community of nations in the face of a common challenge. It is also fact that this global, novel virus that keeps us contained in our homes—maybe for months—is already reorienting our relationship to government, to the outside world, even to each other. Thus ,if the shock of corona virus disruption isn’t enough for us to recalibrate and reflect on our values and life priorities, what will be?

In the hopes of ‘flattening the curve’ of the pandemic, a coronavirus culture has emerged, spontaneously and creatively, to deal with public fear, restrictions on daily life, and the tedious isolation of quarantine. Traditions have developed because they fit the ecology and biology of the times. This crisis has also raised serious medical, ethical and logistical questions too. But, for faith communities who are among those most affected by this virus simply by virtue of the fact that they gather in person frequently, it raises additional questions and challenges.

There is a point of view, that COVID-19 crisis poses a challenge to faith and religion, thereby losing its potency in the lives of people, as ‘science and medicine’ is said to be working out to be a more reliable solution in fighting this pandemic. However, it is naïve to make this comparison as faith/religious values and science is not in contradiction with each other. Each plays important, significant and complementary roles in our lives. Faith in the Divine and prayers hold us together in hope and community as a distraught world is losing its sense of direction and purpose at these difficult times, while ‘science and medicine’ is effectively tackling the virus in practical ways. Thus, down on earth, as this pandemic has been felling lives, livelihoods and normalcy, on the contrary, billions of the faithful, are drawing even closer to religion, which has become the solace of first resort for them!

During the course of history, faith in the Divine power, has been the glue that holds people together in moments of crisis like this and also a purveyor of hope in moments of immense anxieties and fears. It has been a remedy against despair, providing psychological and emotional support that is an integral part of well-being. At a time when the people are exercising social distancing and are facing lockdowns and curfews, religion also acts as antidote to loneliness, which several medical experts point to as one of the most worrisome public health issues of our time. At a deeper level, religion, for worshipers, is the ultimate source of meaning. Besides, the most profound claim of every religion is to make sense of the whole of existence. Thus, when the religious needs of practicing people aren’t met, it leads to a tension between physical health and spiritual comfort, which in some ways becomes an irreconcilable one- a dilemma which inevitably generates some sort of interior starvation. Thus, for the faithful, religion becomes a fundamental source of spiritual healing and hope for human kind, and will in fact complement the efforts of the scientific and medical community in helping them to manage this crucial time phase in their recorded history. In this context, the role of religion in helping to manage this crisis; even its post-phase, will expand rather than diminish as some may naively think.

Already religion has been playing a positive role in the containment exercise of this virus. Many changes and adjustments are already evident in the practise of faiths in the face of this global pandemic. Around the world, many faiths have been adapting to the new reality surrounding the Corona crisis. Heeding public health warnings, churches, mosques, Hindu Kovils, Buddhist temples and synagogues are changing rituals in an effort to contain the spread of the virus. Houses of worship have already faced closure or have gone empty. Many religious leaders have made fervent appeals to the faithful to stay at home and engage in worship, while making unprecedented and drastic moves to change their routines, such as cancelling worship services, closing religious schools and holy sites. For Muslims for example, congregational prayers on Friday is a religious obligation. But as congregations across the country and the world weighed whether to stay open, experts in Islamic law stepped in, entreating the faithful to follow government guidelines and avoid the mosque even for these weekly congregational Friday prayers and instead pray at home. Saudi Arabia closed both sacred mosques in Makkah and Medina. Other religious leadership too made similar moves. Sunday Mass and Easter services cancelled too. The imperative need to avoid public spaces in hoping to contain the spread of coronavirus, was impressed upon on believers of all stripes knowing that God helps those who help themselves and others around them, with thoughtful prudence.

How significant will the role of religions be, during this difficult phase and its post-phase? The interaction between religious and scientific communities can however be inhibited by a perception that they don’t share the same worldview. But in fact, both religion and science basically work around a same core value- to heal mankind and the world around them in different ways. Thus, if ever religious and scientific communities need to join together in pursuing wholeness and healing for the world, it’s now, when mankind is facing an existential threat.

The coronavirus pandemic is affecting all nations and all classes of people, redrawing global priorities and disrupting economies in unprecedented ways not known in recent history. Each country needs every other country and everyone within its borders in its fight against this deadly virus. The wizardry of modern technology is overwhelmed and the advanced medical systems of the super powers have palpably become idle boasts in the face of a shock of this magnitude. Even the US despite being a great power, in the wake of this COVID-19 transnational threat, like climate change, has come to realize that it cannot protect its security by acting alone. This crisis will reshuffle the international power structure in ways we can only imagine, as it provides a seismic shock that permanently changes the international system and balance of power as we know it. The pandemic itself is proof of our interdependence. Every nation, and increasingly every individual, is experiencing the societal strain of this disease in new and powerful ways. Amidst this, there is also a conflicting reality that all countries are turning inward and saying, ‘I am going to do what is good for me’.

Be it as it may, isn’t Corona Pandemic a great leveller of sorts? The world, particularly the powerful nations, in its on-going and Post corona phase ought to realise their inherent weakness in the wake of this invisible enemy and therefore realize the imperative need for humility and inter dependency and support without engaging in futile shows of macho power. The mirage of dignity and the reality of inequality in the lives of people are exposed like never before. The religion has a role to play in taking this message to the grass root level of the society and encourage them to think and compel their leaders to think about all levels of humanity whether within or outside their borders. There is also a need for the institution of Religion to provide leadership along with the HR activists to force the hands of their governments as well as international agencies to initiate sustainable and realistic programs of action to help the poor and the needy across the globe, and stop the hypocrisy around the human rights regimes used by the powerful nations as a tool to control the developing world.

Need for rapid expansion in testing for COVID-19 in Sri Lanka

March 31, 2020, 6:57 pm

As we come to the end of the ‘official quarantine’ period and begin to relax the lockdown within Sri Lanka, but keeping the ‘international lockdown in place, we need to look at how the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID -19 behaved in other countries. (please see graph below)

Based on actual case numbers from the countries given in the graph, Sri Lanka can expect an upsurge in the number of COVID-19 cases in the coming weeks. This may get further aggravated during the upcoming Sinhala and Tamil New Year in mid-April 2020 (week six) where we can expect mass internal migration of fellow citizens within the country.

This calls for the health (both state and private sector) and non-health sectors to act in a pre-emptive manner to deal with the inevitable morbidity and morality which is to be expected. The health authorities should, as per the WHO appeal, use ALL available health resources, within the country, to deal with the health outcomes and outputs of the pandemic to contain and mitigate it and sustain such control over time.

A key scientific tool in containing and mitigation the spread of the virus is to know with certainty who has the virus and where those who have the virus are located geographically. THE ONLY WAY OF DOING THIS IS TO TEST FOR THE VIRUS.

Therefor, there is a dire need to rapidly increase and expand the testing of our citizens if we, as a country, want to have a positive impact on the pandemic in our country and thereby secure the health and wellbeing of our fellow countrymen. The strongest point of our response to the pandemic from a healthcare perspective should be how we improve our weakest point which at the moment is testing for COVID-19.

Please consider this appeal as one OF HIGH PRIORITY. WE HAVE ONLY ONE CHANCE TO GET THIS RIGHT – THERE IS NO PLAN ‘B’.

Dr Ruvaiz Haniffa

MBBS, DFM, PgDip ,MSc, MD, FCGP, MRCGP

Head, Dept. Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo

I give below comments from my colleagues on the issue of the need for rapid expansion Testing for COVID-19 in the Sri Lankan population

Comment 1.

If we do not expand testing and identify those with the virus the curfews would be useless. In addition, we need to test the exposed healthcare workers and either clear them as soon as possible so that they can continue to work after the minimum period of isolation or send them for treatment as soon as possible. Otherwise there will be no one to work – like at DHM now where all consultant OBGYNs, except for the Prof Unit one, are on self-isolation at home

I looked at the list of lab equipment that the Ministry of Health has requested from donors. I cannot understand the logic behind the genetic equipment that they want including nine RT PCR machines, presumably to set up nine labs in different hospitals. The cost of the equipment that the ministry is looking for is above 300 million rupees, nothing less. Even if you get the money for these equipment, constructing the labs, bringing down equipment, installing and commissioning them, hiring people, training them, trouble shoot assays, etc., will take six to nine months. As you know I am talking from experience. And all of us know how the government system works.

In the meantime, there are labs in universities – Colombo, SJP, Kelaniya, Peradeniya, KDU and the private sector Asiri, Durdens, Nawaloka, Lanka Hospitals and SLINTEC that have already functioning labs with RT PCR machines. All you have to do is get the kits and pay for the overheads. I know the universities and the private sector will do it as a national need. You will be up and running by next week. We need testing to be started now. Last Friday’s and this morning’s incidents where people were freely mingling in markets would have speeded up the spread. If we are not detecting cases, the reason is we are not testing.

Prof. Vidya Jyothi Vajira H. W. Dissanayake MBBS, PhD, FNASSL Chair, Senior Professor and Head of Department of Anatomy; Director, Human Genetics Unit; Chairperson, Specialty Board in Biomedical Informatics, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka

Comment 2

We cannot be complacent. We are sitting on the tip of the iceberg. Our testing is limited to PCR at MRI and JPU. We are not looking out to detect and track cases actively. We are passive: only a selected lot of those seeking treatment are tested. If we do not actively detect the iceberg would become a volcano. We should now go for rapid slide tests, similar to NS1.

Vidyajothi Prof. Harendra de Silva

MBBS(Cey) FRCP (Lond & Edin) FRCPCH (UK) MSc (Birm) FSLCP (SL) DCH (SL) FCGP (Cey) FCCP (SL) FCPS (Pak)

Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics (SL)

Comment 3

The current lockdown (national curfews, work at home, school closures) plus MOH actively tracing contacts of foreign arrivals should work in controlling the current outbreak and bringing cases down to zero within two weeks.

MOH’s policy will work in stopping the epidemic, but this policy cannot be sustained. The economy is at a standstill, unemployment will rise, businesses will go bankrupt, living standards will fall, and the government has no revenue. We need to allow businesses and schools to re-open to restart normal life and get the economy going.

We also need to open our ports, even on a restricted basis. But allowing foreign arrivals will import the virus again, since it has now spread to every country in the world. This is not going to change for the next 12 months. If we open the airport and keep businesses and schools open, then the virus will re-enter and spark a new outbreak, and the government will have no alternative to shutting the airport once again and imposing curfew.

The only solution that allows us to keep our airport open and allows business and schools to stay open is to vastly expand our testing capacity. Much more extensive testing as in Singapore and Korea would allow us to manage the risk of the virus coming in again and allow MOH to know much earlier when an outbreak is developing, allowing much faster corrective action and avoiding lockdowns. More extensive testing means increasing our testing capacity by at least ten fold so we can test up to 10,000 people a day in an emergency. This capacity will also allow us to adopt Singapore’s policy of testing arrivals to further protect the country, which is probably the safest approach if we want to open the airport.

Dr Ravi P. Rannan-Eliya
MA, MBBChir (Cantab), DPH (Harvard)

Coronavirus Diary: Don’t let the COVID-19 beast invade your mind

30 March 2020

Like so many bad things, COVID-19 or Novel Coronavirus came across as something abstract, unreal, something which can’t happen to you. Though its death rate made one think of the Medieval Plague, and three months after we heard of the first Coronavirus patient in this country, it all somehow seemed so far away last week, when the

curfew was announced.
When that happened, I decided to write a Coronavirus diary for my Face Book page. We were no longer working. The paper had shut down temporarily and we were home, not knowing when we could return to work. I had no assignment to cover the epidemic.
But there is something in you which rebels against the idea of being confined, mentally, spatially, turning your own house into a prison; you rebel too, against the idea of being just a cog in a massive engine which suddenly shuts down in the middle of nowhere.
People working in certain sectors all over the world, from health workers, garbage collectors, street sweepers, delivery and transport workers, police, the military, and other essential services were taking massive risks simply by going to work. I have no idea if the media is classified as an essential service, but it is. Listening to radio was a huge source of comfort and information, and online news was a source of strength even if newspapers were shut down in many countries.

"But there is something in you which rebels against the idea of being confined, mentally, spatially, turning your own house into a prison"

Mother and the daughter from New Zealand

I felt bound by conscience to keep a text plus visual diary of daily events as well as my own emotions throughout this ordeal, hence this Coronavirus diary. I prefer to call it that rather than the now official term of COVID-19, which sounds clinical and dry. (Novel) Coronavirus is more colourful, bringing to mind an image of something nasty with fangs and tentacles, straight out of a science fiction movie.
The diary started on Thursday, March 19, when I went to Pettah to record how fear of the epidemic was affecting life in this commercial beehive of Colombo. There were two water taps installed by traders where you turn towards Malwatte Road, (formerly Front Street) across the road from the Fort Railway Station.
Though many shops were shut, pavement stalls were open and brightly lit till past 7.00 pm, but the railway station had very thin crowds, as it was a day off for all employees - state
or private.
The curfew came to force at 6.00 pm on Friday. It was supposed to be lifted on Monday morning at 6.00 am, but went on till 6.00 am on Tuesday. Photos of the foreigners – the mother and daughter from New Zealand walking their dog near the Town Hall, and the three young French nationals stranded without a taxi in front of the closed Qatar Airways building, as well as a Chinese couple hurrying on foot with their groceries, were taken just before the curfew came into effect.

"From Saturday to Monday, I photographed what I could from home, in the street outside or in the neighbourhood"

French Nationals stranded without a taxi

The laughing, chubby man is ‘Goluwa,’ a familiar sight in the Borella area for more than 20 years. He disappears from time to time and I saw him after a long time on Friday morning, March 20, along Cotta Road. As cheerful as ever, he could be the only person known to me totally unaware of Coronavirus, or blissfully unconcerned if he knew about it.
From Saturday to Monday, I photographed what I could from home, in the street outside or in the neighbourhood. Irangani, the street sweeper who turned up alone to work on Sunday morning, told me she had no money to buy provisions as the company pays them only on the 10th of each month. These people, and the beggars below them are the hardest hit. Then come the animals, cats and dogs, birds and beasts.
At the Buddhist temple, which faces Borella junction, there are hundreds of pigeons and they are given food and water daily. The temple was closed from Friday and the pigeons were starving. On Monday, a policeman came and left a few lunch packets there, but I didn’t see anyone feeding them after that.

"Our mental and physical capacities will be stretched to the limit, and we will need all our inner resources and some luck to survive"

On Tuesday, once the curfew was lifted, I rode my scooter to Negombo to buy some dried fish. When the meat ran out, I could feed the dogs and cats with that. In Colombo, the traffic didn’t look heavy though there were kilometre long queues outside every supermarket and the police keeping an eye, though the crowds were orderly.
Many wore masks. Others covered their faces with cloth or handkerchiefs. How people found masks is a mystery, as none of the Colombo pharmacies which I visited had any. I covered my face with a scarf until a friend found me a mask in Negombo.
The road was clogged all the way from Wattala to Ja Ela, with vehicular traffic and pedestrians, and there were long queues outside supermarkets, pharmacies, petrol stations (with people queuing up for kerosene as well), groceries, vegetable stalls and meat vendors.
In Pitipana, the fishing hub of Negombo, all the boats were berthed. The vendors were selling frozen fish from their stores, no fresh fish was available. By the time I got there, the crowds were thinning, but a friend told me both the town and adjacent roads were jam packed with traffic - vehicular and pedestrian, that morning.
Now it’s back to curfew. The good news is that the expected spike in cases didn’t happen after the curfew was re-imposed, and no new cases were reported yesterday. Hopefully, we will be spared the worst. But we will have to live with a huge amount of uncertainty and fear in the foreseeable future. Our mental and physical capacities will be stretched to the limit, and we will need all our inner resources and some luck to survive.
It isn’t just social distancing that is going to help us survive. It is our capacity to find hidden strengths and resources.

Curfew & Covid-19: Cost Of Crowding Will Be More Than The Cost Of Curfew

By Thangamuthu Jayasingam –MARCH 31, 2020

Dr. Thangamuthu Jayasingam

Nature (online edition) heads today 31 March 2020 as “Coronavirus latest: lockdown in Europe could have averted tens of thousands of deaths.” Infection control measures put in place in many European countries – such as national lockdown- are reducing the corona virus. Across 11 countries in western and northern Europe between 21,000 and 120,000 deaths will be probably have been avoided by the end of march according to a new model by a group at Imperial college London.[1]

Isolation has been the tried and tested process of limiting the spread of contagious diseases over history and is well documented in the cases of diseases such as tuberculosis, small pox and leprosy. Many were considered as terminal illnesses and the isolation was to prevent others from being infected as cure was not possible at that point of time in history. Although vaccines have been developed for those diseases and they are not incurable anymore, we have had new examples over and over again requiring isolation as a best mode of reduction of infection in the system. Corona (COVID-19 Virus) is the latest in the series that had almost affected the entire world at different levels.

Different countries have approached the problem of coping with the infection differently, but ISOLATION has been the prime mode of spread control from China to Sri Lanka. It has been noted that the countries which were reluctant to make large scale isolations have had to eventually pay the price of escalation of the infection and then subscribe to isolation controls one way or the other. Many countries have today closed their borders, stopped internal travel and transport between cities and districts and also ships and flights have been cordoned off. These indicate the seriousness of the threat of infection by Corona Virus, as it stands today. The United States, one of the more affluent countries, has the highest number of suspected cases which go beyond 100,000 and the death toll is on the increase. They have no answer as yet.

WHO congratulated China on a “unique and unprecedented public health response reversed the escalating cases”. Early models of the disease spread without containment effort suggested that 500 million people would be infected (40% population). Within seven days of lockdown the number of individual gave the virus dropped to 1.05, amazing says Adam Kucharski of London school of hygiene and tropical medicine. The control measures worked says Christopher Dye, an epidemiologist at Oxford.[2]

Social distancing is a technical form of isolation to make the distance between the subjects far enough so that the probability of disease infection is minimized. This together with washing of hands frequently would almost nullify the chances of fresh infection from the Corona Virus. Sri Lanka had done well regarding the control of the spread of the Virus, though we started a little late as pointed out by some authors. But as ACKNOWLEDGED by many experts, commentators and institutions, the closure of many if not almost all institutions and imposition of curfew have been in the right direction towards curtailing the spread of the infection. However the recent curfew patterns in parts of the country and the relaxation of curfews questions the fundamental purpose of all these actions, whether we are considering isolation as a prime means of reducing infection or as a routine mechanism in the process.

It has been observable that the social distances have been higher during normal days in the cities whereas during periods when the curfew is lifted and people pour out onto the streets to make the best use of the windows of gap in Curfew, this has extensively reduced the social distancing in buses, offices especially Banks, shops, super markets, road side sales outlets etc. Once the infection has spread increasing the distance again by reimposing the curfew does not matter. The next level operates in the family and neighborhood and thus increases the epidemic.

The fatality rates are lower than the parellels viz SARS(severe acute resp[iratory syndrome), MERS( middle east respiratory syndrome and Ebola. But the infection also seem to spread easily than others.[3]

One infected person would be able to affect around 500 members with Coronavirus over a few weeks given the rate of spread of this Virus as 2-3 as suggested by many researchers. This could be brought down to nearly 50 or less by increasing the social distances which was the theory behind closure of schools, airport, universities, offices and declaration of curfew.

Best example from Seatlle: Bedfords team calculated that over the six weeks several hundred people could have been infected. Basic reproductive number is taken as between two and three and if we half this with mitigation strategies then the outbreak will no longer grow”[4]

However, the current management of curfew where a longer period of curfew is interspersed with relaxation of the curfew negates the principle that social distancing should be maintained, as it has reduced the social distances and negates the benefit of the social distancing during curfew to zoom into zero. This is evident in the hustle and bustle that is visible during the curfew break, when people rush out on to the streets and into the supermarkets, banks and pharmacies to stock up. T

Prof Kalinga Tudor de Silva states, “others were seen congesting at the grocery stores, markets despite all steps by health authorities to control the pandemic”. Panic buying is a nature“ I cannot blame the public entirely. They are scared about the provisions for their families more than the virus”[5]

There is a probability that we would, and could, be in the next cycle of the epidemic which will be worsened by this process of negating social distancing. This was very well explained by the GMOA Vice Chair, who was on the TV recently and I presume these worthy professionals have briefed this to the Government and the corona task force.

As stated previously, the bigger the social distance the lower the probability for infection to spread. However if the mean distance is high, but frequent pockets of crowds make low distances periodically then the spread is made in the pockets, which then could infect the others singly or as a group later. I have witnessed many examples from Batticaloa from my own experience and others from social and other media.