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States across India experience the second wave of coronavirus, there are three opinion on whether the government re-extend a nationwide lockdown as the virus has hit India like a tsunami. One opinion is that it should be extended more strictly no matter the negative impact on the nation’s economy. After all, those holding the view insist that life is more important than wealth. The other is the opinion that a lockdown be imposed with certain restrictions but relaxing protocols for economic activities such as agriculture, services , retailers and manufacturers of essential goods to function. The third opinion is that lockdown has not achieved the desired objective and so it is better to emphasise on mass vaccination. Those holding the third opinion also believe that mass vaccination and making individuals take more responsibility to adhere to covid protocols and conducting random sample tests was the best option. The first wave of the pandemic in 2020 elicited a knee-jerk reaction from the government when it announced a nationwide lockdown on March 25,2020 without so much as taking heed to advice of health experts and scientists. Lakhs of migrant workers were uprooted and had to trek thousands of miles to their home states and during which hundreds died. The Lockdown had somehow lessened covid cases but even on this, renowned scientists, virologists and epidemiologists chose to differ with the government data. In addition, these experts had also warned the government against proclaiming success prematurely. The WHO had recommended using this “opportunity”(Lockdown) to train and deploy healthcare and public health workforce, implement a system to find every suspected case at community level, ramp up the production, capacity and availability of testing, identify, adapt and equip facilities the countries will use to treat and isolate patients. Even as early as April 2020, many health experts had warned that the virus was adapting and mutating, which could make the virus spread faster and possibly more difficult to treat. However, the government appeared more intent on apportioning credit for political gains. The Health Ministry officials proclaimed victory by citing studies from government –sponsored institutes, which suggested that lockdown had considerably reduced spread by at least 41%.The political leadership was busy offering platitudes about epidemic preparedness and inter-ministry coordination rather than hugely increasing hospital beds, essential drugs, vaccines, oxygen equipments and healthcare professionals need while attending to Covid-19 patients. Instead, the government went back to election-mode and on March 21 Modi along with Uttarakhand chief minister Tirath Singh Rawat addressed lakhs of people for the Kumbh Mela. Devotees attended in the millions, and soon began testing positive by the thousands. On April 1, the day the super-spreader event began, the state recorded a total of 1,863 cases. On April 26, it recorded 35,864 cases. Since the past few weeks India continues to record highest single day new cases in the world from 1 lakh cases from March to over 2 lakh in April and by May, the world record continues to be broken with over 3 lakh cases which have now crossed 4 lakh single day cases. Instead of controlling the virus, the government appears more keen to control free flow of information in the media. It is time that the government admit that community transmission had taken place since April-May 2020 and today, it should exhibit a political will for a stricter lockdown.<\/p>\n
What must be done<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}