GOVERNMENTS NEED TO AVOID IMPOSING ARBITRARY LOCKDOWNS

Delhi has emerged as one of the biggest success stories of Covid-containment in the past few months. As the country begins Unlock 4.0, the national capital has its own strategies of survival.

- NAMITA KOHLI

Delhi is well past its Covid-19 peak. The peak had come in June, when a deluge of cases had exposed an acute shortage of hospital beds and testing kits. The prognosis looked grim: Cases were expected to surge to five lakh by the end of July.

By August, though, the state government had turned things around. The test positivity rate, which stood at 31.66 per cent on June 14, fell to around 6 per cent two months later. A high positivity rate indicates that only the potentially sick are being tested; a low positivity rate points to the slowdown of the spread.

The slowdown in Delhi has been significant. On September 1, it reported 2,312 new cases, up from the seven-day average of 1,855, but well below the peak in June (3,947 cases). With 14,626 patients, Delhi is now fourteenth among states in terms of the number of active cases. There have been 1.77 lakh cases and nearly 4,500 deaths.

“Things changed when the focus shifted from providing only tertiary care to giving primary-level care for those with mild disease,” says Dr K. Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India. “The strategy of segregating people with mild symptoms for home isolation, providing them pulse oximeters and thermometers, and following up with them worked.”

The involvement of AYUSH medical practitioners helped preempt shortage of manpower. “Kerala, for instance, involved only allopathic doctors initially, giving rise to a shortage. In Delhi, AYUSH doctors have been involved, since April 14, in testing centres, Covid care centres and even hospitals,” says Dr Amar Bodhi R., associate professor at the Delhi government’s Dr B.R. Sur Homoeopathic Medical College and Research Centre.