Lockdown And After
FRONTLINE|May 08, 2020
In India, decisions on strategies to contain COVID-19 are being made on the basis of unreliable data, but two things are clear: the number of infections is still on the rise and once the lockdown is lifted there will be a resurgence of cases. The government needs to come up with a calibrated approach to manage both in the post-lockdown period.
R. Ramachandran
Lockdown And After

At the end of the first week into the second phase of the country’s extended lockdown (April 21), the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, the number of those recovered and the number of deaths stood at 18,601 (14,759 active), 3,252 and 590 respectively.

The rates of increase both in the number of confirmed cases and in the number of deaths (in percentage terms) have come down to single digits (Figures 1 and 2). The plots in Figure 2, which is on a logarithmic scale (with each unit on the y-axis increasing by a factor of 10), are linearly increasing, which is what they would look like if the number of cases (and correspondingly the number of deaths) are still on an exponentially increasing curve.

The two phases of lockdown have certainly achieved their objective of slowing down the transmission of the infection in the population. This, as mentioned above, is also evident from the fact that the rate of increase in the number of infections has been coming down since the lockdown began. In the second phase, in fact, it has come down from a 10-15 per cent rate of increase to under 10 per cent, a little flattening of the curve. That this should happen is intuitively obvious when physical distancing between people and person-to-person contacts are minimised; the chance of one individual passing the infection to another has been greatly reduced.

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