Lockdown in Delhi extended, to be eased in phases

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday extended the month-long lockdown in the Capital by another week, but said that the government will consider a phased withdrawal of restrictions from May 31 if the daily cases of the coronavirus disease continue to decline.

Taking a cautionary stand, the chief minister said that the larger public opinion supported the extension of the lockdown for another week – till 5am on May 31.

“In the last 24 hours, we asked several sections of people what to do and the larger opinion is that the lockdown should be extended by another week. If we open everything now, there is a risk that we may lose all gains on the Covid-19 front we have made over the last one month,” Kejriwal said at a virtual press briefing.

“However, if the curve (of Covid-19 cases) continues to decline like this for a week, we will start a phased un-lockdown process from May 31. We cannot open everything at one go. There is immense risk in it. So the relaxations have to be implemented in a phased way. I hope people will cooperate in this,” he added.

There is no word yet on the relaxations that may be announced by the government. Under the existing lockdown, general movement of people and economic activities are prohibited, with exemptions only for those engaged in essential services. Metro services, too, have been suspended for the last two weeks and will remain closed for now. On April 19, the weekend curfew in Delhi was turned into a full lockdown for six days.

This is the fifth extension of the lockdown that was necessitated by the fourth and the deadliest wave of infections in the city; at the time, Delhi was adding an average of 20,065 cases per day with every one in five person tested being diagnosed as Covid-positive.

This runaway spread of the outbreak unraveled the city’s public health infrastructure, particularly from April 22 to the first week of May, when hospitals faced an acute shortage of oxygen and other drugs as patients and their families scrambled to find hospital beds.

Since then, the city has scaled up medical facilities and services while the transmission of the outbreak has slowed down -- a trend experts attributed to the effect of the lockdown, adherence to Covid-appropriate behaviour and a natural ebbing of the wave that is likely to have infected those vulnerable.

Delhi has added an average of 3,286 new cases daily in the last seven days. On Sunday, the Capital city recorded 1,649 new cases, its lowest single-day tally since March 30 and 189 deaths, according to the government’s health bulletin.

The positivity rate, which soared to a peak of 36% on April 22, dipped to 2.42% on Sunday. Epidemiologists say a positivity rate – the proportion of samples testing positive for the viral illness – below 5% indicates that the outbreak is under control.

Health experts said the government’s move to wait for another week before taking a call on lifting restrictions to allow some resumption of economic activities appeared to be well thought-out.

“The city cannot remain under a complete lockdown forever. That is understandable. Before relaxing the lockdown, Delhi should ideally have a positivity rate of less than 5% for at least one week. Cases are declining and they are likely to further decline by May 31. A phased re-opening of important economic activities can be considered at that point. Also, people must remember that they cannot let their guards down like they did before the second wave of the pandemic hit India. For governments, this is also the time to scale up vaccination,” said Dr Puneet Misra, professor of community medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi.

Traders associations, too, said they welcome the decision to consider lifting curbs. “Relaxing the lockdown at this point and at one go could have led to a surge in cases again. The government, however, should consider giving some compensation to traders whose income has been affected by the lockdown,” said Praveen Khandelwal, secretary general of the Confederation of All India Traders. Saurabh Gandhi, general secretary of United Residents of Delhi, a collective of around 1,800 resident welfare associations (RWA) in the city, said: “It was evident that the situation in Delhi would not come sufficiently under control till the end of this month… Now they should focus on increasing vaccine coverage.”