Epidemiological challenges amidst the global coronavirus pandemonium and long-term policy considerations for a Post-Covid-19 future in India

Pages: 245-252
Ranju K. Anthony (Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi)

The human coronaviruses have been known to be extremely infectious and have always been considered to be potential pandemics in a globalised world that we live in. The outbreaks lately have become far more frequent and lethal and pose questions if at all, these outbreaks have to be linked with geo-political ambitions of countries or even organisations. The most recent pandemic, Coronavirus disease 2019 (or Covid-19) has been categorised as one of the most infectious diseases, caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), and has already reached to catastrophic levels in terms of the sheer number of people it has infected, the human fatalities it has caused and the insurmountable socio-economic fallouts, yet to be assessed. India’s so far, resilience in handling this “force majeure situation” is being widely applauded, by affected countries, international organisations and even by the fiercest of the critics within the country. On the onset, the complete lockdown implemented by the Government of India starting March 25th (after an experiment with voluntary lockdown on March 22nd, 2020) sounds a bit on an overdrive, but as on 03rdMay 2020, the results are consistent, with doubling of cases in between 10-11 days compared to doubling of cases in 3 days prior to the lockdown.While looking at the enormity of the situation, with global cases close to touching 3 million cases, and the healthy system infrastructure already stretched to its limit, clearly, it’s still way to untimely for a self-congratulatory jig, however, it is perhaps time to reassess the strengths and weaknesses of the Indian health system and the requisite overhauling it requires to circumvent any such future event. The objective of the review article is to be an enabler in decoding the epidemiological complexities surrounding the Covid-19 and plausible policy progression strategies that may help in augmenting India’s health system architecture. The few silver linings that could be quoted has been managed within the limited resources even though while deviating from certain internationally recommended procedures and creating a few of its own to delay community transmission, a strategy, that was initially received with caution internationally, but seems to have done a lot of things correct for India. Because of the abruptness of these measures, the financially distressed population has been bearing the majority of the brunt, for an epidemic they had no bearing whatsoever. How the Government of India’s prognosis based on its substantial expertise in handling infectious diseases in the past ameliorated the local situation epidemiologically, resulting in forestalling community transmission of this infectious disease, the associated ‘politics in epidemics’ and the key learning (s) in the form of recommended intervention for future mitigation of pandemics in future forms the crux of this review article.