Experts suggest change in India's Covid-19 strategy as vaccination coverage reaches 75%

Make masks available freely to poor, improve primary healthcare, experts suggested

With more than 75% of India’s adult population fully vaccinated, public health experts on Sunday suggested modifications of Covid-19 strategies such as free distribution of good quality masks to the poor and using hospitalisation numbers instead of test positivity for guiding public health action in future.

The experts also flagged the importance of betterment of the primary health care delivery system to tackle any upcoming surge rather than short term strategies like movement restrictions and school closure.

“Good quality masks should be supplied free of cost to low-income families with explanations of benefits provided by health workers and community volunteers,” K Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India told DH.

Many others agree with Reddy on having a policy to make good quality masks freely available to people. The poorer section of the society either reuse ordinary surgical masks or normal cloth masks, whose protective ability is lower than N95 or similar masks.

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“Using effective masks has not been easy, at least in part because there has been no policy to make high-efficiency reusable masks freely available,” observed Satyajit Rath, a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Pune.

The Union government on Sunday announced that more than 75% of India’s 94.47 crore eligible population is now fully vaccinated. Also 60% of the adolescents belonging to the 15-18 years of age and peak of the third wave seems to have been crossed ten days ago.

On January 20, India logged more than 3.47 lakh fresh cases, which is the highest in the ongoing surge as the number of daily counts continues to slide since then. Over 2.34 lakh new cases have been recorded all over the country even as more than 500 districts still register a test positivity ratio of 5% and above.

“More than test positivity rates, which are affected by many variables, numbers of seriously ill persons needing hospitalisation should guide our assessment of pandemic severity at this point. Wherever there are many persons requiring hospitalisation, stricter restrictions may be enforced. Elsewhere, we may resume normalcy in stages,” said Reddy.

Experts are unanimous on resumption of offline classes in schools and colleges, on which the Union government is expected to make a policy announcement soon. While a few states have begun to open up the schools, there are many others, which didn’t.

“If there are any lessons from two years of the ongoing pandemic it is that temporary measures such as restrictions of movement and closure of schools are stop gap interventions. Strong primary health care delivery systems will determine the future course of such public health emergencies,” said Oommen John, a senior public health researcher at the George Institute of Public Health, here.

“Many of the restrictions such as night curfews, weekend curfews and limiting occupancy of public transport to 50% capacity were not based on any scientific evidence,” he said.

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