Reporting from Ground Zero: Swine Flu in India

I came to Pune from Mumbai morning 8 and the bus normally full of passengers had quite a few seats. It might be the time of day, 8 am bus on a Tuesday morning might not work for the usual office goers who want to be at it by 10 but a suspicious lack of coughing sneezing in the bus is its own story. The expressway was practically deserted save the container trucks and an occasional car or a bus, so travel seems to be a bit impacted.
Pune has been homogenized. There are only 4 kind of people - without masks, green mask, yellow mask and white masks. Its interesting that 'swine' flew masks mostly resemble a snout! There was lesser than usual traffic on road, again might be the non peak hour. But I suspect its also because schools, theaters etc are closed. Overall the smoke situation is more than I'd prefer but marginally less than usual.
Passed the Aundh Chest hospital (1 of the initial 2 hospitals tasked to test for swine flu) on the way and the crowd there looked less than usual. But then again I only could see the entry side of the place so it seems the testing panic is now abated a bit.
I wonder about the masks though. Will they lead to a false sense of complacency since i understand swine flu masks need to have finer holes for breathing than normal surgical masks and I saw mostly the green ones and many people wearing handkerchiefs. The housing society also apparently distributed 2 masks/house. Given that masks need to be disposable and are effective only a few hours I am not sure if they are going to really help but if it leads to peace of mind so be it.
So as we see nothing really to panic about. People are a bit wary but life is going on.
What I find disconcerting is our tendency to react and not pro-act! The government initial asked private sector to stay out of it (conflicting statements there). The ministry said they'll co-opt private sector when they'll need to. They also said capability upgrade to test for the flu will take months and they are working on it. Given that WHO had upgraded it to Pandemic level months ago, that the ministry did not do any thing is bad. And the fact that they were waiting for the flu to hit hard within India when they planned to upgrade capacity speaks volumes about their critical thinking. A report in a newspaper yesterday mentioned it takes 6 hours for a batch of 40 samples to be tested. And there are so few government labs. What if like UK (much less population) which had 5000+ cases in the last week being reported India too is required to test hundreds of thousands of sample a week and has to wait for a month for new labs to come online?
I hope the government tasks one of the many professional health agencies under it to henceforth monitor global disease trends and accordingly act in time.