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.