COVID-19 - a reminder to better ourselves.

ISLAMABAD -- Coronavirus is now everywhere from mass media to social media, daily death counts dominate dinner conversations, the number of new cases instills growing fear and herbal to nuclear medicinal cures are the most forwarded messages on WhatsApp.

This hysteria is leading to food shortages, empty pharmacies, counter-measure policies, job layoffs, stock market crashes, stimulus packages and state compensation bills. The world seems to be tumbling down a well of misery.

In Pakistan, the supreme leader commands us not to be afraid, opens the borders to infected neighbours, seeks waivers from loaning agencies and masquerades the disease intensity.

Prime Minister Imran Khan government's systematic failures over the last year and a half are a testament that the corona crisis will be no different. The PM is a history major from Oxford, yet fails to realise that past epidemics or pandemics caused exceptional damage to the human civilisation.

Examples include the Black Death (years: 1347-1351, deaths: 200 million), Small Pox (1520, 56 million), Spanish Flu (1918-1919, 40-50 million), HIV/AIDS (1981-present, 25-35 million) or The Great Plagues (1165, 0.6 million).

The truth behind the charade is that not only is the national exchequer bankrupt and is in no position to provide financial bailouts but also Pakistan has never developed its manufacturing sector to sustain itself, in the said case being pharma, health care and medical equipment.

The country's reliance on foreign credit and foreign procurement have made it completely reliant on international high-technology vendors and susceptible to high pricing while continually depleting local innovation.

In all first-world nations, the development of any product is made by the local industry. In Pakistan, however, we have failed miserably to invest in the public or private sectors of applied engineering and product development for non-military purposes.

The limited manufacturing is always for arms and the businesses are state-run. So how are these billion-dollar bombs going to save us from the COVID-19?

PM Imran's vision is to eliminate the import-export differential, but what the policymakers fail to register is that, apart from agriculture, what does Pakistan have, which is exportable and competitive in the global markets?

Even the public sector is in shambles, the companies under the government umbrella are as political as is the government itself. No real scientific progress ever takes place...