India stands on the verge of community transmission as the government gives its green signal to allowing opening up religious places.
Recently, in a poll conducted in the United States comprising around two hundred epidemiologists, and when interrogated on how long would it take them until they would return to places of worship, around forty-three percent of the sample space that they would undertake that in around three months to one year of time, and astoundingly a similar percent of the respondents considered the time to be more than one year. They have advised that religious congregations in large amount leads to defying of social distancing norms and as well as pacifying the rate of contamination as seen in some of the countries worldwide. This should be more than enough for policymakers to delay the unlocking of religious places as they are slowly resuming normalcy.
While the government has legislated on issuing e-passes, registrations online, markings indicating the distance to be maintained between devotees and the usage of personal protection equipment kits by the staff members, such mass conventions stand in contrary to generally accepted standards of prevention of communicative diseases.
Notably, all the temple boards, Islamic associations, and churches who have decided to keep their places close for devotees until the situation is fully restored, deserves appreciation.
India stands fifth in the list of nations in terms of the number of cases reported and the curve is still rising in the upward trend and at this moment, India could not afford the risk of community transmission.
Presently, the priority should be reviving the already drowning economy health which is further damaged the pandemic, and the lockdown that followed and all other activities that don’t remains essential should be pushed until the nation has a grip over the virus and treatment is made available for the patients.
Although India’s lockdown was the most stringent globally yet the curve of the spread was not under reins but it brought forth many drawbacks. Thus, India needs to chalk its strategy for resuming the activities very delicately. Leaders should show the political will to implement the standards in the way that public deals in the mass like wearing masks or maintaining the necessary distance. But the requisite political force seems to be lacking as visuals were seen from many cities, prominently Mumbai that remains one of the worst-hit cities. The mandatory night curfew is also not strongly implemented yet.
This all incidents remain a source of headache keeping in mind the limited capacity of the Indian medical system.
Therefore, the government should be very careful in framing the policies for the unlocking phase. In case the government gets the priorities wrong, we stand in cross paths as we can enter a series of disasters that would take a long time for us to recover from.
