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India Covid crisis: Fauci suggests lockdown as cases surge

Mumbai - India should do what China did last year at the start of the Covid-19 crisis, said Fauci.

A complete shutdown for a few weeks is the only way to rescue India from the ongoing Covid crisis, which is taking a huge toll every day, says Dr Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the Joe Biden administration.

“What needs to be done is shut down the country temporarily,” remarked Dr Fauci in an interview with an Indian newspaper.

“When China had this big explosion a year ago, they completely shut down. And if you shut down, you do not have to do it for six months. You can shut down temporarily to put an end to the cycle of transmission…Literally, lock down so that you wind up having less spread. No one likes to lock down the country. Well, that’s a problem when you do it for six months. But if you do it just for a few weeks, you could have a significant impact on the dynamics of the outbreak.”

Dr Fauci, who has been featured in a few publications, told the Indian Express that India should do what China did last year at the start of the Covid-19 crisis.

“Literally, within a few days to weeks they built these emergency units that served as hospitals to take care of people,” he pointed out. “It was an accomplishment that everybody marvelled at. It just seems to me, what I was viewing on television, what people were looking for (in India), a desperate need for hospital and care. That’s the first thing.”

Different government groups need to be mobilised. Interestingly, he also referred to the defence forces. “Can the military come in and help? You can immediately get military help the way we, in the United States, have used our National Guard to help us distribute the vaccinations,” he said. “I think it should at least be seriously considered. The intermediate — to get hospitals built quickly. I mean really quickly, within a matter of — you know, they put up these field hospitals that they built during war. You should think of this, in some respects, like a war. The enemy is the virus. So you know where the enemy is, so I would make it almost like wartime because it’s an emergency.”