New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in his series of talks on Covid-19 pandemic interacted with Professor Ashish Jha of Harvard University who said that “lockdown is not a goal” but a time to separate infected persons from non-infected ones, when you can’t test aggressively. He said the lockdown has psychological impact too on the people.
“Lockdown buys you time, but lockdown is not the goal unto itself. You can use that time to prepare a really fabulous testing, tracing, isolation infrastructure. You want to use that time to communicate with people,” said Jha.
The Harvard Professor says that vigorous testing, tracing and isolation is helpful, “but if you can’t do that, then you have to lock everything down. Can you slow down the virus from a lockdown? Of course you can. But it has very substantial economic repercussions,” he said.
While Ashish Jha said that the reason to do the lockdown is that you are trying to slowdown the spread of the virus, as the virus is a new one. The humanity had not seen this virus before. That means all of us are suspects. All of us are susceptible population. Left unchecked, the virus will grow exponentially, he said.
“And the way to stop it is to take infected people and separate them from un-infected ones,” advocated Jha.
The Harvard Professor said that life will be very different when lockdown ends.
“This is not about going back to what life was like last May or June. That life over the next 6-12-18 months is going to look very different. And its really is about planning all of that out. So it’s not just communication, but really thinking through, what will public transportation look like? Who will go back to work. What will schools do. There is a lot of work you want to be doing during the lockdown,” he said.
