NEW DELHI: The release of
lockdown in India
has to be selective and careful. Measures are required to ensure people living ‘hotspots’ – areas where there are identified Covid-19 positive cases - do not start going into new places and spreading the disease.
David Nabarro, World Health Organisation’s (WHOs) special envoy on Covid-19 said this on Thursday while addressing the Global Online Conference on Covid-19: Fallout & Future, organised by
Bennett University.
“No country wants to stay in lockdown for any longer than its absolutely necessary. So, the best thing to do now is to develop community level capacity for detection and isolation of positive cases,” he added. The WHO special envoy on Covid-19 praised India’s decision to introduce an early lockdown.
“It helps in buying time and reducing the intensity of outbreak. This time can be utilised to build capacity and get the population ready to deal with the potential crisis,” Nabarro said. He added that it is not easy to develop a vaccine against coronavirus and it is tougher even to develop enough vaccines so that everybody in the world can be immunised on short notice.
Read Also: ‘Dharma Sankat’ for govt over lockdown, Gurcharan Das says“With a lot of luck, we might have a vaccine that’s available for administration within 18 months. I foresee this can be longer,” Nabarro said.
The global online conference was also attended Professor Wenjuan Zhang, former public interest lawyer and currently director of Center for India-China Studies at the O P
Jindal Global University
and Dr Beatrice Galleli from University of Bologna, Italy. They shared the experience of Covid-19 management in their respective countries. Zhang said China didn’t realise the magnitude of the crisis initially but once the disease entered stage II of transmission the government was quick to ensure complete lockdown to limit disease spread.
Read Also: Social distancing and lockdown most potent 'vaccine', says Harsh VardhanItaly, Galleli said, was severely affected by the Covid-19 outbreak as the local government failed to take the threat seriously. “We thought that the problem exists in far east in China and it won’t ever reach the west. Also, the local government was too wary of the economic fallout of a complete lockdown,” she added.
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