Prior to one day before the lockdown in India ends or let's say extends former White House official Rajeev Venkayya has said that a three-week lockdown is a reasonable starting point to contain the coronavirus pandemic in a country like India. However, Rajeev also said that the three-week extension might not be enough to contain the coronavirus in India.
Rajeev Venkayya, Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense at the White House during the Bush administration who oversaw US preparedness for bioterrorism and biological threats, said it was difficult to say how much more time India would require to control the COVID-19 challenge.
PM Modi will be addressing the nation on April 14 around 10 am on the ongoing situation of lockdown and coronavirus in India. On March 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown in India to stem the spread of coronavirus in the country.
“From an epidemiologic standpoint, I don’t know if three weeks will be enough. It may require more time,” said Venkayya, who was responsible for the development and implementation of the National Strategy for Influenza pandemic during the second term of the Bush administration.
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“We will have to look at what is happening in other countries,” he said.
“But if you were to ask me whether that will be enough given the size of the population, the healthcare capacity, the uniformity or lack of uniformity that is inevitable in a federated country like India where there a lot of State autonomy on what to do and how to do it, and varying levels of compliance, I think this could easily go much longer,” Venkayya said.
A three-week lockdown is a reasonable starting point to contain the coronavirus pandemic in a country like India, he said.
“It now called the flattening the curve strategy. At that time, we called it a targeted layered containment and then it became called community mitigation. But the first flattening the curve graph was published in our federal guidance in 2007,” he said.
“When I was in the White House, we were preparing for an influenza pandemic we realized that vaccines would not be available for many months after a pandemic started. And based on the 1918 experience, we expected there would be multiple waves of the pandemic and that for at least the first wave we would not have vaccines,” he said. cancelling public gatherings, social distancing as well as isolation and quarantine for people that have been confirmed or suspected to have the virus.
Emphasizing the importance of doing these things early in the outbreak, he cautioned that else it would be much harder to prevent a large number of people from getting infected and accomplishing the goals of flattening the curve and delaying the peak of the curve.
“So here I think it very important that India took (lockdown) action now, ….. like many countries, there isn’t widespread availability of diagnostic testing. And so it hard to know how much virus is in any given community in India,” he said.
“We also know that the threat is greater in India than it may be in other places because of the population density. Also, there are significant portions of the population that don’t have access to the healthcare services that would be necessary to take care of large numbers of sick people. So, it (social mitigation measures) becomes even more important in India than it important everywhere,” Venkayya said.