Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Life, they say, comes full circle.

And coming full circle from last week, this is Savio again as Ruhi’s taking a well-deserved break. 

But there is another circle that I want to talk about. And it’s been coming sooner and sooner over these past two years. 

That’s right. I am referring to the P-word. Or the C-word. 

Barely had we dealt with one Covid-19 wave before the next one was upon us. Now, the third wave was quite a while back, relatively speaking. But my numerous Whatsapp chat groups inform me that the fourth wave is upon us. 

You laugh. But the media doesn’t seem to have any concrete news either.

Indeed, the US probably has a stealth wave ongoing, while there is panic buying in Beijing amid fears of another lockdown.

And various Indian states have already started issuing the oh-so-familiar list of precautions. Roll up your sleeves and take that vaccine shot; roll up that mask and cover your nose.

However, this time around, the precautions seem quite diluted compared to the previous waves. For one, there is not a peep about a city-wide lockdown, forget a nationwide one. 

If you dare, cast your mind back to the precautionary to-dos during the first wave of infections. Wash your hands (repeat), wear a mask (and cover your nose), maintain at least six feet distance (2 km is best), 14-days quarantines for the infected (and half a dozen tests), and myriad home-made immunity-boosting recipes.

Somewhere between the waves, these measures dropped off the list one by one. The only one that’s survived is “wear a mask.”

And what’s even more interesting is how the narrative of the face mask seems destined to follow the narrative of handwashing.

A narrative that actually started more than 150 years ago, in the mid-nineteenth century.

The good doctor

In the 1840s, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis was appointed as an assistant at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. Similar to other hospitals around the world at the time, many women were dying of a mysterious illness called childbed fever, either during or after childbirth. Semmelweis discovered a disturbing trend where the doctors’ clinic had an average mortality rate of 13-18%, compared to just 2% at the midwives’ clinic.

But he could not figure out the reason. Until, one day, he had a brain wave. Semmelweis was conducting a post-mortem on a doctor who died of a scalpel wound—one acquired while performing an autopsy—and noticed a striking similarity in the pathology of his friend’s illness and that of the women with childbed fever.