Covid-19: Drop in numbers, but festive worries continue

Even though the number of daily fresh coronavirus cases has once again fallen below 70,000 and the daily toll under 800 for the second time in six days, experts are worried about a second wave in November as more and more people have started coming out throwing all the cautions out of the window.

According to the Union Health Ministry, there were 66,732 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours whereas 816 people lost their lives to the coronavirus in the same period. The last time such a drop was recorded was in the October 5 data.

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Also for the fourth day after the active cases dropped below the 9 lakh mark, the declining trend continues. Since September 18, the number of new cases is on a steady downward path. But as the festival season draws near, there is palpable tension among the policymakers and public health specialists.

"The decline is welcome. But if we fail to continue with the preventive behaviour, then you are proving an opportunity to the coronavirus to spread. We need to be very cautious with the behaviour,” D C S Reddy, a former community medicine professor at the Banaras Hindu University Institute of Medical Sciences and a member of the ICMR research group on Covid-19 epidemiology and surveillance told DH.

State-wise total number of confirmed cases, deaths

Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan appealed to the people to shun the crowd in the festive season and stay indoors in order to fight the epidemic.

But the ground pictures from the states reveal an entirely different story with the people thronging the roads, markets and public transports without caring for any social distancing. A large number of them are not even wearing face masks.

"You can’t have a society where people will stop mingling. Whenever we try to do administrative control (like a lockdown) we fare badly. You need to give a controlled relief to the people,” said T Sundararaman, former executive director at the National Health Systems Resources Centre, Delhi.

Modelling studies carried out by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed that near-universal use of masks and following the social distancing norms can prevent up to 200,000 deaths by December.

But the government campaign asking people to follow such norms seems to have little effect so far.

For the upcoming festival season, Sunderaraman suggested that the administration should fix a threshold on the daily cases or deaths (for a district for example) and monitor the situation closely so that lockdown can be imposed once the threshold is crossed. “But this needs a much higher level of organisation,” he cautioned.