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    Living with Covid-19: How lives have changed

    Synopsis

    ET brings you a wrap on the virus' spread and containment measures taken over the past week.

    thumbAgencies
    Journalist Anastasia Osipova practises ballet in her apartment in Moscow on Friday during a lesson through a video link, after the city authorities announced a partial lockdown.
    - As India completed its 10th day in lockdown the number of Covid-19 positive cases has jumped four times

    - In the last one week increase in India was 766 new cases, up nearly 300% over the previous week, but the total number of tests, too, have gone up

    - Beginning with 14,000-odd tests on March 19, India has tested nearly 66,000 samples till date

    What experts say
    The World Health Organization in this week’s briefing has maintained that countries need to follow their ‘Test, Trace and Isolate’ strategy. WHO’s Dr Micheal J Ryan this week said that lockdowns are just a way to buy time and prepare the health systems for what is to come next.

    Untitled-4Agencies


    Has the lockdown worked?
    Several experts are still evaluating whether the lockdown has had any impact. But it is early days still, some say. Dr Gangakhedkar of ICMR talking to the press this week once again stressed that most people were not capturing the halt in disease transmission by those who sat at home and avoided the spread. The Indian government has stuck to its stand that the country still is in local transmission stage, i.e. it is still able to trace the new cases to those who had travel history or were in contact with those who had a travel history.

    A study released by researchers from Shiv Nadar University said that the lockdown measures in an optimistic scenario has helped in bringing cases down by 85%, compared with a hypothetical scenario of no lockdown: “We considered the optimistic scenario, where cases are isolated immediately in day 1 or 2 showing symptoms. We assumed 80%- 90% of population contributed to social distancing. In this optimistic scenario, the projected number of symptomatic cases can decline by nearly 85% at day 20 from the beginning of the lockdown (3,500 against 30,790) and deaths (105 against 619) as well. Thus, intervention (20-day lockdown) may help at slowing transmission and “flattening” the Covid-19 curve”.


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    Subscribe to The Economic Times Prime and read the ET ePaper online.

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