Lockdown sans strategy, wasted opportunity

With 10 days to go for lockdown 3.0 to be lifted, it would be a good time to examine the efficacy of this concept of community confinement. When the Centre first decided to implement a nationwide shutdown with strict guidelines, India was lauded for being proactive and putting the nation’s health ahead of its economy. To get over a billion people to change their way of life is no easy task, and accolades poured in from across the world. However, in the weeks that followed, it has become increasingly apparent that the Centre has caught the tiger by its tail. If imposing the lockdown was challenging, lifting it is proving to be even more cumbersome.

Easing the lockdown is fully dependent on the government’s ability to contain the virus, and protect the public even after the restrictions have been lifted. However, one must remember that the lockdown is prevention and not a cure. While restricting the movement of people for 30-45 days was an important step to break the virus chain, these restrictions should have been used to buy time to implement more long-term measures like sustainable social distancing and ideally, develop a vaccine. But the fact remains that we are nowhere close to finding a way to keep people safe from the virus, and going by the alarming number of asymptomatic carriers, even detection is proving tough.

Going ahead, there needs to be a deep-dive into the nature of the spread to understand what ails each state. Merely collating and comparing cases is not enough. For instance, Tamil Nadu’s numbers may be daunting but it has a very good recovery rate which is praiseworthy. On the other hand, Maharashtra’s increase in the number of positive cases is a matter of concern as the state accounts for nearly 20 per cent of coronavirus cases nationally, and almost 50 per cent of deaths caused due to the virus. This shows that under similar circumstances and following the same containment strategy, different states have shown completely different results.

What is urgently needed is a very strategic approach where in addition to testing, there should be no let-up on monitoring and contact tracing. District-level involvement is a must, and the Centre needs to rope in grass-root level officials to create a robust system for alerts as a large number of cases can be traced back to individuals belonging to the unorganised sector who continued to operate without supervision.

A national lockdown where the rules are not tweaked according to the emerging patterns, where the state administration is not effectively roped in and one where the Centre is the sole decision-maker, will prove to be both draconian and a wasted opportunity.