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Nagaland’s High Powered Committee(HPC)on Covid-19 announced the third unlock on July 17 amidst a note of caution by the principal director of health & family welfare Dr. Neikhrielie Khimiao that Lockdown would be re-imposed if the situation does not improve. The state has recorded a steady decline in covid-19 cases from around 12 % during May-June to 8% by mid-July. The decline in positivity rate had, in a way, provided the ground for unlock 1,2 & 3. Nagaland declared its second total lockdown from June 4 till June 11 but was extended to June 18 and subsequently Unlock -1 was announced w.e.f. July 1. As per Unlock 3 ; shops will be allowed to open (on rotational basis); Churches, weddings and funeral services will be permitted with a capacity of 50 people in attendance; Government offices will resume with 50% of staff in attendance and Curfew to remain from 7 p.m. till 5 a.m. Under Unlock-III, educational institutions and offices allowed to reopen in a staggered manner with 50% attendance admissible with strict adherence to covid protocols. In a way, this is an attempt to ‘normalise’ life as much as possible in order to restart the economy. Many people live mostly in rural areas and most of them are farmers or engaged in small time business. Some activities such as farming, construction, restaurants including roadside businesses have been relaxed but with strict adherence to covid protocols. When Unlock-III was decided, the positivity rate of Nagaland hovered around 6%. Within the next few days, the rate shot up to 8 %. Even as the overall weekly nationwide Covid-19 positivity rate has come down to 2.32%, most states in the northeast have many districts recording a positivity rate above 10%. Several districts in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Tripura have reported a high positivity rate of above 10%. This has been a cause of concern for the centre and the prime minister. The views on unlocking has always been debated by officials. One view is that relaxing lockdown should not be as important as saving lives even under extended Lockdown. The health experts say that relaxing lockdown means people will come into contact with more people and that increases the opportunity for the virus to spread. That was how the second wave spread rapidly and the Delta virus made things worse with spikes in new cases and more deaths across many countries, especially India. The experts maintain that the focus should be on getting people vaccinated and preventing another wave of infections. With health infrastructure in over 80% of the state, especially in rural areas, being without adequate manpower and also medical facilities, there is need to seriously consider whether easing curbs of Lockdown should be the primary focus of the government. Also, most epidemiologists predict more waves, given that India is evidently still far away from reaching herd immunity and its vaccination rate remains slow. The same is the case with Nagaland where testing is low and which has pushed up positivity rate. As a rule of thumb, one threshold for the percent positive being “too high” is 5%. For example, the World Health Organization(WHO) recommended in May last year, that the percent positive remain below 5% for at least two weeks before governments consider reopening. Nagaland should ponder over this issue with deep introspection since its health care will be severely tested when the third wave appears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fingers crossed<\/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-209585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209585","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=209585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}