COVID-19 Surge: Micro Lockdowns, Travel Curbs Necessary, Says AIIMS Chief Randeep Guleria

There is also a need to contain the virus in areas where it is spiking, Dr Guleria said.

New Delhi: There is a need of new strategy to battle the surge in COVID cases in the country, which is promoted by laxity in safety measures and a mutant strain of the coronavirus, said All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi chief Dr Randeep Guleria on Saturday, reports NDTV. What the country now has is community transmission and unless it is contained, the healthcare system will be overwhelmed, the AIIMS chief said.

“We have to aggressively work on reducing the number of cases,” through a bigger range of measures, including “containment zones, lockdown areas, ramping up testing, tracing and isolation,” Dr Guleria said. He also suggested “micro lockdowns” were necessary to contain the spread.

“We can do things that do not hit the economy in a big manner and one of them is non-essential travel. People can obviously postpone their holidays and vacations for some time and that will help decrease the spread of infection to areas where there are not that many cases,” he told NDTV.

This is a big change, “because we are not talking of only air travel but travel by road and train and all of that becomes hard when you look at it in a holistic manner,” he added.

Several states have issued restrictions on travel to and from Maharashtra, which is the worst affected by the virus. But besides Maharashtra, seven other states are driving the spike in numbers. The list includes Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh.

There is also a need to contain the virus in areas where it is spiking, Dr Guleria said. For this, it is essential to ramp up genome sequencing and connecting it with epidemiological data from the ground. The government is maintaining that the emerging second wave of the virus is due to laxity in observing safety measures like the use of mask and social distancing.

“The fact that data is not there does not mean it is not happening,” Dr Guleria has said in an earlier interview. “It is likely logically that if there is a sudden surge in cases, there is something which is happening which is making the virus more infectious,” he had added.

India on Sunday recorded 93,249 new coronavirus infections, the highest single-day rise so far this year, which took the total COVID-19 cases to 1,24,85,509, according to Union health ministry data. This is the biggest daily rise in cases since September 19, when 93,337 fresh infections were recorded. The death toll climbed to 1,64,623 on Sunday with 513 new fatalities, the ministry data updated at 8 am showed.

Registering a steady increase for the 25th day in row, the active cases surged to 6,91,597, accounting for 5.54 per cent of the total infections. The recovery rate further dropped to 93.14 per cent, the data stated.

(With inputs from PTI)