Dr Randeep Guleria - the chief of Delhi's All-India Institute of Medical Sciences and a top member of the government’s Covid-19 Task Force on Saturday said the country needs a new approach to battle the recent coronavirus surge that has been fueled by carelessness in maintaining and following safety measures and a mutant strain of the covid.
The AIIMS chief stated that India is now in the community transmission stage and unless that can be contained, the health care system will be overflooded. "We have to aggressively work on reducing the number of cases," through a bigger range of measures, including "containment zones, lockdown areas, ramping up testing, tracing and isolation," Dr Guleria said. He also suggested "micro lockdowns" were necessary to contain the spread.
"We can do things that do not hit the economy in a big manner and one of them is non-essential travel. People can obviously postpone their holidays and vacations for some time and that will help decrease the spread of infection to areas where there are not that many cases," he said.
Adding that there’s a big change, he said, "because we are not talking of only air travel but travel by road and train and all of that becomes hard when you look at it holistically.”
The country has reported 93,249 fresh infections in the last 24 hours, the biggest daily surge in Covid-19 cases since mid-September. The new numbers have taken the total caseload to over 1.24 crore. This is the highest since September 19, when 93,337 cases were reported.
Many states have published travel restrictions on travel to and from Maharashtra which is the worst hit by the novel coronavirus. But besides Maharashtra, seven other states are pushing the spike in numbers, including Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh.
Dr Guleria further said that there is a need to contain the spread of the virus in the areas where it is increasing. For this, it is crucial to ramp up genome sequencing and connecting it with epidemiological data from the ground. The government is maintaining that the emerging second wave of the virus is due to carelessness in observing safety measures like the use of masks and social distancing.
Also Read: India records 93,249 new Coronavirus cases, highest since mid-Sep
Earlier in an interview, Dr Guleria said, "The fact that data is not there does not mean it is not happening.”
“It is likely logically that if there is a sudden surge in cases, there is something which is happening which is making the virus more infectious,” he added.