Policymakers played catch-up: Covid task force
CRITICISES DATA OPACITY, ‘INCOHERENT’ GOVT POLICIES COMMUNITY SPREAD IS ‘WELL ESTABLISHED’
Even as the nationwide tally of Covid-19 cases crossed 190,000 after a record single-day jump of 8,392 positive cases on Monday, the joint Covid task force of public health experts said the current situation could have been avoided had migrant labourers been let off in the early days when the spread was low.
The task force also raised the issue of opaqueness of the data maintained by the Centre, as well as state governments, saying it had posed “serious impediment to independent research and appropriate response to the pandemic”.
The joint statement by the Indian Public Health Association, Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine, and Indian Association of Epidemiologists — which constitute the task force — stated “the returning migrants are now spreading infection to each and every corner of the country, mostly to rural and peri-urban areas, in districts with relatively weak public health systems (including clinical care)”.
A senior member of the task force said there is no single curve for the country or even states and there are pockets where the disease is at an advanced stage of community transmission. “We have to locally analyse these areas and define them geographically, just like containment zones,” he said.
In its recommendations to the government, the task force suggested all data, including test results, must be made available in the public domain for the research community to access, analyse, and provide real-time context-specific solutions to control the pandemic.
With cases continuing to rise at a rapid pace, the joint task force said it was unrealistic to expect the pandemic to be eliminated at this stage, given that community transmission is already wellestablished across large swathes or sub-populations in the country.
The senior member also said the implementation of the lockdown, meant to contain the spread, was treated more as a law and order issue than a public health one. “The whole exercise was overshadowed by enforcement rather than education,” the senior member said.
The task force pointed out in its statement that India’s nationwide lockdown from March 25 till May 31 had been one of the most stringent and yet Covid cases have increased exponentially through this phase. “This draconian lockdown is presumably in response to a modelling exercise from an influential institution which presented a ‘worst-case simulation’... Subsequent events have proved that the predictions of this model were way off the mark.” The experts across the three bodies said in the statement that “had the Government of India consulted epidemiologists who had better grasp of disease transmission dynamics, compared to modellers, it would have perhaps been better served”.
It criticised policymakers for relying “overwhelmingly on general administrative bureaucrats”. “The incoherent and often rapidly shifting strategies and policies, especially at the national level, are more a reflection of ‘afterthought’ and ‘catching-up’ phenomenon on the part of policymakers rather than a cogent strategy with an epidemiologic basis,” the statement said.
The task force suggested that the most effective strategy to control the spread during all stages of transmission is source reduction through use of masks, cough etiquette, and hand hygiene. It also asked the government to constitute a panel of inter-disciplinary public health and preventive health experts and social scientists at the central, state, and district levels to address both public health and humanitarian crises.