A World Health Organisation’s top emergency expert on Sunday said “lockdown” measure initiated by several countries were not enough to prevent the spread of coronavirus and focus should be on detecting the infected people.
“What we really need to focus on is finding those who are sick, those who have the virus, and isolate them, find their contacts and isolate them,” Dr Mike Ryan said in an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
“The danger right now with the lockdowns ... if we don’t put in place the strong public health measures now, when those movement restrictions and lockdowns are lifted, the danger is the disease will jump back up.”
Much of Europe and the United States have followed China and other Asian countries and introduced drastic restrictions to fight the new coronavirus, with most workers told to work from home and schools, bars, pubs and restaurants being closed. India too on Sunday asked the States to allow only essential services to operate in districts with confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Ryan said that the examples of China, Singapore and South Korea, which coupled restrictions with rigorous measures to test every possible suspect, provided a model for Europe, which the WHO has said has replaced Asia as the epicentre of the pandemic.
“Once we’ve suppressed the transmission, we have to go after the virus. We have to take the fight to the virus,” Mr Ryan said.
