Dystopia beckons.

Byline: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

IT is here. More than four months of almost daily acrimony and bungling on the part of officialdom later, Pakistan has become one of the global hotspots for the novel coronavirus. It was a matter of if rather than when, but we - and the two-fifths of humanity that reside in the Indian subcontinent - are now in the thick of it.

Speculating about the ultimate damage that this deadly pathogen will do is an exercise in futility. It has already ravaged individual countries like Brazil and the world system more generally, the IMF's most recent estimate suggesting that global economic output will decline by $12 trillion. Indeed, the identifiable fallouts of the pandemic are simply the tip of the iceberg. The interrelated crises that have been exposed by the pandemic will continue to unfold in the years ahead, and thinking through them critically is imperative if there is any chance of halting an increasingly rapid slide into dystopia.

Take, for instance, what Covid-19 has illuminated about the actual workings of the health sector. The perilous conditions in which doctors, nurses and other essential workers in the public sector are performing their duties and the exhaustion of public health facilities more generally is common knowledge. But less discussed is the shameless profiteering off those who are affected by the disease, and the tens of millions of people in this country who suffer ailments other than the coronavirus.

The rates of private hospital beds and other services have increased exponentially. Basic medicines are being sold on the black market at exorbitant prices. Even hailing an ambulance for emergencies incurs scandalous costs. This is aside from the sale of 'magic' treatments like the blood plasma of recovered Covid-19 patients that harken to established and despicable practices like the selling of kidneys.

The pandemic's identifiable fallout is just the tip of the iceberg.

In a nutshell, an increasingly large number of working people in Pakistan are already at the mercy of a privatised healthcare system, sharks lurking at every corner to pillage the toiling classes who are at best uninformed and at worst prone to be taken for a ride because of the worldview that our paranoid state apparatus has inculcated over the decades.

The situation in the education sector is similar. The once ubiquitous idea that the state must provide affordable education to all of its citizens, up to the level of the public...