The lifting of the lockdown imposed to check the spread of Covid-19 across India has to be carefully managed, though social distancing will still be necessary in some form, agreed experts at the International Online Conference on Covid-19, organised by Bennett University on Thursday.
The challenge was to determine what should be done once the country came out of the lockdown, the experts said. They felt that the revival of India’s economy could not be entirely ignored, pitching it as a dilemma between saving lives and saving livelihoods.
Lockdown only till absolutely necessary
David Nabarro, World Health Organization’s special envoy on Covid-19, said, “No country wants to stay in lockdown for any longer than is absolutely necessary. So, the best thing to do now is to develop community level capacity for detection and isolation of positive cases.” He added that it was not easy to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus and tougher still to develop enough vaccines to immunise everyone on short notice. “With a lot of luck, we might have a vaccine within 18 months,” Nabarro said.
No medical reason for extending lockdown except in hotspots
Concerned about the economic impact of the lockdown and how the country can phase out of it, Dr Devi Shetty, chairman, Narayana Hospitals, proposed that the hotspots could remain sealed, while other areas gradually opened up.
“We can say that we have reduced the mortality rate by 50% in India because of the early lockdown, which did not happen in many other countries. Going forward, we need to gradually lift the lockdown and have an unconventional exit strategy. There seems no