The lockdown period was an opportunity to aggressively test, track and treat and fill the gaps in public health infrastructure, but that opportunity seems to have been frittered away. Our story has been one of the pendulum swinging too widely from lockdown to laxity. So, people-partnered public health and decentralised data-driven decision-making must become the main engines of our epidemic response from now on. What explains this trend, especially as the lockdown and the easing of lockdown happened uniformly across the country. During the full lockdown period, testing numbers were less important than preparing for larger scale testing as the lockdown ended.

Source: The Hindu August 18, 2020 01:30 UTC