{"id":99880,"date":"2020-03-12T18:07:51","date_gmt":"2020-03-13T01:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=99880"},"modified":"2020-03-12T18:07:51","modified_gmt":"2020-03-13T01:07:51","slug":"sl-health-system-cannot-cope-with-the-pandemic-close-airport-for-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/03\/12\/sl-health-system-cannot-cope-with-the-pandemic-close-airport-for-a-month\/","title":{"rendered":"SL Health System Cannot Cope with the Pandemic; Close Airport for a Month"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Dilrook Kannangara<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>WHO declared\nCOVID19 a pandemic. A pandemic is a global epidemic. Apart from a very few\ncountries including Burma, nowhere is safe from the infection. Within 2 days SL\nrecorded at least two patients. The health system is wholly inadequate to face\nthis challenge. Infrastructure within hospitals is insufficient and the\ngovernment does not have the funds to sustain a sustained campaign to attend to\nthe infected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Further, if\nwidespread it will devastate poor families as their sole breadwinner will be\nput out of daily-wage work for a considerable time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even big business\nwill come to a grinding halt if the spread is not contained. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These are the real\ndangers of the pandemic, not death rate which is low. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Government of SL must\nimmediately close the airports to contain the situation. Many countries have\ntaken drastic measures. The amount of foreign currency earnings lost is minute\nin comparison to the economic disaster that awaits. Sri Lanka has a natural sea\nbarrier to save itself from epidemics. It is time to close all man-made entry\npoints into the island for a month. China\u2019s situation is now easing as the\nepidemic there is on the wane. The initial phase is the most dangerous and that\nis why the airport must be closed ASAP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dilrook Kannangara WHO declared COVID19 a pandemic. A pandemic is a global epidemic. Apart from a very few countries including Burma, nowhere is safe from the infection. Within 2 days SL recorded at least two patients. The health system is wholly inadequate to face this challenge. Infrastructure within hospitals is insufficient and the government does [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dilrook-kannangara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}