The number of coronavirus infections is rising rapidly just as India is emerging from the lockdown imposed in late March to contain the pandemic. This begs the question: was this prolonged lockdown, one of the harshest in the world, effective?
When the lockdown was imposed, public health experts advised that its central purpose ought to be to buy time to ramp up testing and scale up quarantine and healthcare infrastructure. “You cannot fight a fire blindfolded,” warned Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. “We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test.”
