Flagging off both roads and hospital project, Sanwo-Olu enumerated benefits of good road network for ease of doing business and accessibility to quality healthcare to reduce infants and maternal mortality. Sanwo-Olu said that the construction of the New Massey Children’s Hospital and the reconstruction of the Adeniji Adele, Oke Popo and Tapa Street were an integral part of the Greater Lagos Vision. He said that the strategic roads would add value to the New Massey Children’s Hospital being reconstructed and upgraded into a seven storey, 150-bed multipurpose Pediatrics and General Hospital. He listed various ministries working together on the regeneration of the roads as part of the Lagos Island Area North Action Plan to address flooding, gridlock and other challenges on the axis.
I called a friend in Mumbai, Shashank Joshi, who is a member of his state’s
COVID-19 task force. “Our I.C.U.s are nearly empty,” he told me. Joshi is a doctor with seemingly infinite reserves of energy: a stethoscope perpetually dangling across his chest, he has spent the past several months carrouselling among slums, hospitals, and government offices, coördinating the state’s response. Early last spring, when the first serious spread of
COVID-19 was reported in India, Joshi jumped into action. Dharavi, in Mumbai, is Asia’s largest slum: a million residents live in shanties, some packed so closely together that they can hear their neighbors’ snores at night. When I visited it a few years ago, open drains were spilling water onto crowded lanes. (The next monsoon season, three young boys fell into the drains and died.) The tin roofs of the houses overlapped one another like fish scales; a roadside tap dripped a brown fluid that passed for potable water. When a toddler