Capital has turned a corner: CM Kejriwal
Warns against complacency, says home isolation proved saviour
nNEWDELHI: The Capital has turned a crucial corner in its fight against Covid-19, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Saturday, crediting a five-point “Delhi Model” – increased testing, home isolation of mild cases, availability of hospital beds, transparency of data, and plasma therapy – for nearly halving the number of daily new cases in a month.
New cases in the national capital have fallen from an average of 2,184 per day a month ago to 1,475 in the past seven days, making the city the only region in the country with a major outbreak to record a sustained reduction in epidemic growth.
“After about a month, we are seeing the curve go down. The difficult times we saw in June, we haveovercomethat.studyingthe entire Covid cycle and reacting to it has paid dividends. But we should be prepared if there is another difficult situation,” the chief minister said in an interview with HT, citing the example
THE DELHI MODEL
The CM said five key factors helped lead to a sustained fall in new cases of Covid-19 of the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 (when subsequent peaks were worse than the initial one) to urge people not to become complacent.
Focussing on home isolation
HOME ISOLATION
We realised that if everyone turns up in the hospital, no amount of beds would suffice. So, we started focusing on home isolation
TESTING
If you do not test enough, you won’t know the real picture in your fight against coronavirus... Let the problem come on the table. Let everyone know the number of cases
BEING TRANSPARENT
In the first week of June, when it was projected there would be 550,000 cases and Delhi will need 80,000 beds by July 31, we put these projections upfront before the public, and stressed that all of us need to work together was particularly crucial, Kejriwal said, adding that a brief dispute with the Union government -- when the latter first struck down the practice, and then made Covid Centre visits mandatory
FOCUS ON RESOURCES
In the first week of June, there were only 700 beds in Delhi’s private hospitals, of which almost 650 were occupied. We decided to reserve 40% beds and created 5,000 new beds within 24 hours
PLASMA THERAPY
The fifth strategy was plasma therapy, which helped save lives. With all these efforts now we are seeing the curve of daily infections, deaths and positivity rate bending downwards. for an initial examination -- could have hampered the fight. “If home isolation was stopped, if the rules were changed, Delhi would