Medicine Girl

Exactly a year ago, I had journaled1 my first brush with the ominous COVID-19 virus, traveling back home to Pune-India from the United States during a pandemic that was still in its nascent stages. As a past practitioner of medicine primarily and an inquisitive business system analyst by profession, I remember being equally parts curious and nervous while comparing the stark contrast in the administrative pandemic response & surprisingly common public apathy across both countries. The pandemic shone a bright spotlight on some blind spots in healthcare systems across countries.  I nervously agreed with everyone who predicted an impending public health disaster given India’s weak & under-resourced healthcare infrastructure. A year later, with its astonishingly low case positivity & COVID-19 related mortality as compared to some star healthcare systems abroad, India (pleasantly) proved many of us wrong.  With a population of 1.3 billion people that is 4x that of the United Sta