Planning For Future Waves Of The Pandemic

Context: India needs to enhance the surveillance system, vaccinate quickly, and reprioritise healthcare services.

Lessons from Covid 2.0: Strategies to prevent future disasters -

• Strengthen surveillance strategy: To tackle the challenge of predicting multiple waves on account of data unavailability due to unreliable testing and under-reporting of cases and deaths.

• • Use real-time data: By encouraging reliable reporting and initiating standardised definitions.
  • Adopt a syndromic approach of identifying suspect cases and through a reliable testing strategy which does not change when there is a surge in cases.
  • Accounting international experience: In Japan, health system is crumbling during the fourth wave.
  • Strengthen review mechanisms: To detect the outbreak in initial stages and counter it sooner.
    • For E.g. India missed building containment and mitigation measures while Maharashtra was seeing a surge in cases during the second wave.
  • Accounting threat of new variants: Concurrent genomic sequencing in real-time in a fixed proportion of samples to give an idea of the likelihood of variants causing several outbreaks.

• Vaccinate the population: Proactively reach out to all vaccine manufacturing firms in the west and invite them to collaborate with Indian firms under ‘Make in India’ programme.

• • Fast-track manufacturing of all vaccines which are already approved by regulatory authorities through single-window clearance.
  • India can become a soft superpower if it facilitates faster manufacturing by helping Indian industry.

• Develop a responsive system: Through greater financial allocations, stepping up systems to expand vaccination, applied research (to regularly update vaccines), enhancing effective communication and monitoring effectiveness.
• Promote ‘One Health’ – Respect boundaries of animals and preserving ecosystem in its natural form: 60% of known infectious diseases and up to 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin.

• Develop robust public health workforce

• • Essential to hire front-line workers in public health engaged in surveillance and contract-tracing and mobilise people for primary healthcare services, including vaccination.
  • Ensure that one Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker is hired for every 1,000 people, an Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM) and nurse practitioner are hired for every 5,000 people and
  • Ensure a hospital with at least 100 beds, including beds with emergency and critical care services, caters to a population of 30,000-50,000.