On 24th of March, with a short notice of 4 hours, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown. As many as 1.3 billion people were confined to their homes to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Curbing the spread of the virus by breaking the transmission chain and buying some time to prepare our healthcare system against the virus were two main objectives of the lockdown. Obviously, the opportunity cost tantamount to unemployment, increased fiscal deficit and a declining GDP worsened by movement of migrant workers back to their natives.
India reported its first case on 30th January, 2020. Since then, the number of cases in India has crossed almost 151,767 with the most recent three day rolling average of 6,133 new cases per day.
Compared to several other western countries, India’s lockdown has indeed been able to delay the increase but it has proved to be quite futile in preventing its spread and growth. Cases have actually begun to rise at a higher pace now as compared to the rise that it witnessed in the months of March and April.
Indian government has surely made use of this lockdown in ramping up the coronavirus testing. From a few thousand in the beginning of March to almost 1 Lakh sample’s testing is being done in a day. Currently India — with 0.86 tests per 1,000 population — ranks very low in the list and is above only with respect to Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Nepal, Myanmar, Indonesia and Mexico. Even Senegal, Uganda, Zimbabwe and our neighbour Pakistan are doing better than India, according to Our World in Data , an Oxford University database.
According to Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder-director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) at the University of Washington, US. “India needs to change its testing strategy. Going forward, testing will have to increase significantly but the purpose would be to identify the elderly population who are at risk and to bring them in for treatment. India will probably need about half a million tests a day at that point,” he said in an interview.
The Lockdown has undeniably prevented immediate flooding of the hospitals but has planted a corona time bomb that is surely going to explode as soon as the lockdown gets relaxed and its subsequent lifting.
The Pandemic is yet to reach its peak in India, A report published in medRxiv quotes “it can be deduced that the peak of SARS-CoV-2 in India will be around mid-July to early August 2020 with around 12.5% of the population likely to be infected at the peak time”. An article published in the Lancet mentions “a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear.”
According to Ramanan’s one report presented on 20th April, India has 19lac hospital beds, 95 thousand ICU beds and 48,000 ventilators in total. Most of the beds and ventilators in India are concentrated in seven States – Uttar Pradesh (14.8%), Karnataka (13.8%), Maharashtra (12.2%), Tamil Nadu (8.1%), West Bengal (5.9%), Telangana (5.2%) and Kerala (5.2%). Existing bed capacity is mostly saturated at government hospitals. Accommodation of influx of COVID 19 patients, will require rapid expansion of current capacity or modifications in admission policy for routine patient care.
India has done a tremendous job in the production of PPE kits. According to PD Vaghela who chairs one of the 11 COVID-19 groups empowered by the Prime Minister’s Office. Till March 30, our domestic production was 3,312 PPEs per day, which has been ramped up to 1.9 lakh per day,” Similarly, to meet the demand of 2.01 crore of N-95/99 masks, production was ramped up by more than twice, he added.
The level of preparedness appears to be highly variable from state to state, according to Laxminarayan. None of the five most-affected states have released these numbers in the public domain, with the Centre not ready to release the state-wide distribution of dedicated COVID-19 facilities either.
India has around two months to gear up against the worst phase of the pandemic. It needs to revise its testing strategy and at the same time. It is strictly recommended to scale up the healthcare facilities in the country and prominently in the topmost affected states.
