pros and cons of lockdown due to this lockdown
Answers
To-do lists, schedules, forecasts, deadlines. Human beings are perpetual planners. Before the Corona virus upended our world, we rushed and ranted daily, so as not to fall behind our interminable schedules. To meet the dreaded deadlines. To stay ahead of the curve. To ensure we moved forward in the rat race. And, then as various governments imposed lockdowns across the globe, life, as we know it, came to a halt.
Most of us are locked in our homes, holed up with family members for durations longer than we are used to. Even as we transit to working or studying from home, the humdrum busy-ness that envelopes our lives has abruptly ceased. No Monday morning scrambles, no traffic snarls, no have-to-go-here, have-to-buy-that. Life suddenly is stripped to its essentials. We need to cook, clean, eat and sleep. Those who are fortunate to have the luxury of working online, continue to plod away at screens. We try to keep kids engaged with online and offline activities. The new-normal that we are trying to maintain is unsettling, in troubling and cathartic ways.
Unnerving because we really don’t know what tomorrow will be like. Despite models and predictions by epidemiologists, global health experts and policy wonks, nobody is certain what tidings we might wake up to or when. Though most of us are at home, the very familiarity of our environment increases our disquiet. Our new routines are unfamiliar to us. Apparently, for humans, living with uncertainty is harder than living with pain. According to writer and psychotherapist, Bryan Robinson, participants in an experiment who were told they would definitely receive a painful electric shock were calmer than those who were told that they had a 50% chance of receiving one. Our brains, argues Robinson, are wired to equate uncertainty with danger.
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Yet, despite the unease and underlying anxiety, an unfamiliar, but much-needed, quietness pervades the air. As loud honks and the quotidian cacophony of urban life has been silenced, we hear more birds chirping. The air is palpably cleaner. Our lives are less harried. It’s almost as if, Nature has pressed the pause button on earth. Perhaps, during this long-overdue but sorely-required hiatus, we, humans, need to review, reflect, re-examine and reset our routines.
While we are all making do with less now, do we really need to consume as much as we mindlessly did? With wings on our feet, we traversed the globe either on business or pleasure without paying heed to our carbon footprints. We commuted to work, cursing the endless traffic jams, but not acknowledging our contribution towards them. As more of us find ingenious ways of working from home, do we all need to head out the moment the lockdown is lifted?
Even dual-income earners are now compelled to spend more with kids. Does the world need to come to a standstill for us feel like a cohesive family unit? Earlier, though we led highly networked and connected lives, our ties were often superficial. Though social media helps us stay in touch during this humanitarian crisis, the enforced social distancing makes us ponder on the strength of our ties. Which relationships sustain and nourish us?
Sure, these are unsettling times. Though we hope that the spread of the Corona virus is arrested in its tracks, sooner than later, perhaps, we shouldn’t just revert to our old ways of living on auto-pilot. Perhaps, by unsettling us, Nature is giving us an opportunity to self-correct.
(The columnist is Director, PRAYATNA. Views expressed are the author’s own.)
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Answer:
The transmission rates which have shown a vertical upslope would then have exponentially increased with alarming consequences of a severe disease burden and high mortality. With every passing week, the Indian curve continues to rise at higher rates, even though the slope and pace is not spiralling upward as rapidly as most of the disaffected countries. This suggests that we are in the relatively early phase of our disease burden. This justifies the calibrated extended lockdown with a window to review, reconfigure and realign the future course of actions. The devastating onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in certain developed countries, made it imperative that quantum gains from the three-week lockdown in our country could not be surrendered.
For senior citizens
The government’s focus on enshrining safeguards for the vulnerable populace is praiseworthy. Statistics indicate significantly higher mortality rates in those above 60, especially those with disease co-morbidities. Predictive patterns suggest this age group may account for more than one-third of all Covid-19 hospital admissions; and about three-fourths of ICU admissions, with major fatal outcomes. Hence, key interventions for the elderly may have to be configured with ingenuity to shield this most vulnerable subset. This stratified extended lockdown envisages a significant reduction of the numbers of the freshly infected and also minimises their contact with this vulnerable group.
The big takeaways
The isolation of infective cases and quarantine of exposed (at risk) cases focused around hotspots after April 20 should result in high intervention efficacy with a significant reduction of the Covid-19 transmission rates. This allows the governance an opportunity to reconfigure planning targets and strategies to address the economic downturn, supply chain impediments, unemployment and address basic needs of the poor, through course corrections, as also to prevent our healthcare systems from being overwhelmed.
In light of the recent rising trend, it is fair to assume that a substantial number of infected people may not have been identified, as yet. Hence, innovative tracking mechanisms of the suspect and infected cases may have to be developed to check community spread around hotspots, slums and clusters. The extended, though conditional extended, lockdown will succeed only if strengthened by aggressive early testing of larger numbers, enhanced tracing of contacts, quarantining of the vulnerable elderly and isolation of the infected. These measures will prevent rampant transmission from undetected infective cases, along with systemic investments in social distancing.
The Aarogya Setu App should enable health education of our masses. With the hope of the success of multidimensional strategies to minimise transmission, this extended stratified lockdown should be acknowledged by scientists, epidemiologists, statisticians and hopefully our citizens, as the most reliable mechanism; through effective community containment. Its impact could be the critical turning point in India’s fight against the formidable Covid-19 foe.
Combo testing with PCR and the antibody-based tests will create a robust evidence base through mass screening of the infected, vulnerable and contacts. Quantum gains can be achieved with the isolation of the infected people and quarantine of those exposed. The viable implementation and the sustainability of these measures will require a major ramp-up of our resources. The phenomenally positive takeaways of this strategically stratified but longer lockdown, targeted at the entire population at risk, should translate into a major reduction in the envisaged hospitalisations, ICU requirements and even deaths. This will necessitate innovative interventions of mass screening of the susceptible and vulnerable, aggressive testing and upscaled medical surveillance.
Hour of reckoning
The light at the end of this torturous journey is the development of herd immunity or an effective vaccine, or preferably both. As these are more than a few months if not a year away, we may see multiple surge patterns. Any populist posturing at this crucial phase would have conceded the battleground in our fight against Covid-19. Medical preparedness audits with robust assessment and monitoring mechanisms must address gaps and impediments. The lessons learnt from expanded testing, isolation of the infected and active tracing of contacts must chart the course for future strategies to minimise the spread of this ravaging disease.
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