Until a few weeks ago, corona was a funny WhatsApp forward in India. Like the one about Bengalis having genetic immunity to corona because they grew up with their mothers constantly saying “Koro na (Don’t do it)”. This week at my local pharmacy in Kolkata, the pharmaceutical supplier was greeted with anxious cries of “Did you bring more masks?” He said masks he had bought for Rs 120 a couple of days earlier were now selling for Rs 100 more.

We can roll our eyes at this coronary hyperventilation. As a doctor friend put it, around 770,000 people die of AIDS and related illnesses and 1.35 million die on the roads every year around the world while India has had no Covid-19 deaths reported yet. Thus, condoms and helmets might yield a higher return on investment than these must-have masks. But the fear of an invisible enemy in the very air that we breathe is primal. At least air pollution comes with an ominous cloud of warning. Corona strikes out of the clear blue sky. In fact, in China air pollution has dramatically cleared as the virus shut down factories.

An insightful article in The Atlantic says epidemics reveal the truth about societies they hit. The Chinese paid a high price for their secretiveness and top-down bureaucratic structure. Italians, in contrast, have more confidence in their public health system. The US, it says, might have the “highest-tech healthcare system in the world” but with hospitals stripped to the bone and crippling costs, it has not “created a public-health culture that induces confidence”. That’s clear when one sees Donald Trump boasting that the virus is “very much under control” even as the death toll mounts in Seattle.

In India, the government wants to induce confidence, project concern without panic. The Prime Minister tweeted that he had held an “extensive review” on the country’s preparedness but also cancelled his Holi plans. Unfortunately, the government’s own record in building sober public trust is spotty. In 2016, the government said “Trust us” as it unleashed demonetisation as a silver bullet for everything from terrorism funding to black money to fake currency. When it achieved none of those goals it blithely moved the goalpost. But in the process, the government’s own stature as a credible “facts-first” voice of reassurance in nervous times took a beating.

Harsh Vardhan, the health minister and a medical doctor, has been the government’s face in the corona response. He has asked people to follow basic hygiene, said all passengers arriving on international flights would undergo screening and medical facilities of the “highest order” would be available for patients who require isolation, all sensible measures. Unfortunately, this is the same doctor who advised people to eat carrots as Delhi pollution peaked to a three-year high and quoted fake news about Stephen Hawking saying the Vedas had a theory superior to Einstein’s. That tweet stands without retraction or apology.

The rational face the government seeks to project would have been far more effective if it had a more consistent track record when it came to displaying scientific temper. But science has too often played second fiddle to a marching band that wants to tom-tom ancient Indian civilisational superiority whether it comes to cloning or flying machines, scientific proof be damned.

Even now, a BJP MLA says that the coronavirus can be cured by gaumutra and cow dung. The Hindu Mahasabha wants gaumutra parties where people would drink cow urine and use cowdung-cake agarbatti to kill the apparently cow-fearing virus. The AYUSH ministry issued an advisory prescribing Unani herbs for corona without any scientific corroboration, while the Telangana AYUSH ministry distributed homoeopathic “preventive medication”. While one arm of the government tries to project calm, the other arm blunders around like a bull in a china shop.

The tragedy is that in the furore, we ignore real medical achievements. All three initial cases detected in the country walked out of hospital cured. “I never thought a government system could be this efficient,” said the student who was India’s Patient One. That is something to truly take pride in instead of unproven cow claims.

However, there is one civilisational attribute India can indeed take pride in. To counter a virus that is spread by touch, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has already proposed the namaste in lieu of the handshake or our current favourite, the bear hug. Maybe here’s an Indian trait that deserves to go viral. World Namaste Day, anyone?