Coronavirus pandemic | Lockdown helped flatten the curve, but no downward trend cause of concern: AIIMS Director

The Director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Dr Randeep Guleria, in an interview with The Indian Express, said while the nationwide lockdown has helped flatten the curve, no visible dip in the number of COVID-19 cases is a concern.

"While the lockdown has helped in flattening the curve, the curve has not shown a downward trend. That is a cause for concern. That’s why the next four to six weeks will be very, very important because the lockdown cannot be there forever," Dr Guleria, who is a part of core team of officials set up to monitor and review the pandemic in the country, told the newspaper.

"The ideal, the dream would be to have zero cases. But I don’t see that happening. The number of cases is still increasing everyday. But the rise in the curve is not so sharp that we can’t handle it," Dr Guleria said.

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Dr Guleria added that with easing of restrictions, the most important data point to watch out for would be the number of cases being reported in hotspots and the reclassification of green, orange and red zones.

"The solution is to identify the areas where the maximum number of cases are coming, and focus containment to bring down the number of cases, and convert them to orange or green zones," Dr Guleria said, adding that surveillance in green zones should continue, and movement from red to green zone is restricted.

For this, the official said, the pandemic "has to fought at the community level, not the hospital level". He also added that we will have to learn from history, particularly the period of Spanish Flu, when the situation was similar and most of the 7 million deaths were reported in the second wave.

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"What we are doing today was what was done at that point in time. Schools were closed and stadiums were converted into halls. There was a lockdown and that lockdown was followed very well. But after the lockdown was lifted, they started going back to normal. People celebrated the fact that they were now out, and started partying. We have to learn from history," Dr Guleria told the newspaper.

Echoing what other leaders across the world have said, the AIIMS director said "we will have to learn to live with COVID-19 for quite some time".

"We will have to have strategies which will work with COVID being around. Whether it’s travel or work, it will have to be with COVID-19 being around," he said, adding a lot of work needs to be done to develop a "new normal".