A government's response to
the pandemic should be based on public health science, which thrives on
scrutiny and debate, writes Dr Chandrakant Lahariya.
India reported its first
case of COVID-19
on January 30. Six months later, more cases are being reported than ever on
nearly every day, and India’s case-load curve has stayed stubbornly on the
rise.
The collective strategy to ‘test, trace, treat’ has formed the bedrock of most
governments’ response to the pandemic. India has been ramping up testing, implementing
‘trace’ in the form of contact tracing, and scaling up treatment services
through additional beds--in ICUs with and without ventilators, in hospitals
with and without oxygen, and in isolation facilities.
But on July 31, India had
had nearly 1.7 million cumulative cases, 57,000 new cases and 36,500 cumulative
deaths. Of course, the absolute number of cases is not a good way to measure an
evolving pandemic; we need more nuanced approaches and indicators.
New parameters
Every stage of a pandemic
requires its own set of indicators to suitably assess the situation and deploy
interventions and supportive measures. Recovery rate and doubling rate were
useful for the early stages, but are less so today. In similar vein, aiming to
conduct a million COVID-19 tests every day may not always be the best use of
our resources. We must instead focus our efforts on places where the outbreak
seems to have become widespread.
A few weeks ago, in a press
conference, then the officer on special duty in the health ministry and now
union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan had said India has achieved the WHO
suggested threshold of 140 tests per million population per day.
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