“How Do You Survive A Lockdown When You Depend On Your Daily Labour To Eat?”

Even as India goes into an extended lockdown until May 3, the WHO has said that for countries with large poor populations, the stay-at-home orders and other restrictions used in some high-income countries may not be practical.

Many poor people, migrants and refugees are already living in overcrowded conditions with few resources and little access to health care.

“How do you survive a lockdown when you depend on your daily labour to eat? News reports from around the world describe how many people are in danger of being left without access to food”, the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, remarked at a media briefing.

“As I have said many times, physical distancing restrictions are only part of the equation, and there are many other basic public health measures that need to be put in place. We also call on all countries to ensure that where stay-at-home measures are used, they must not be at the expense of human rights”, he said.

According to him, each government must assess their situation, while protecting all their citizens, and especially the most vulnerable.

That means control measures must be lifted slowly, and with control. It cannot happen all at once. Control measures can only be lifted if the right public health measures are in place, including significant capacity for contact tracing.

“Some countries are considering when they can lift these restrictions; others are considering whether and when to introduce them.

“In both cases, these decisions must be based first and foremost on protecting human health, and guided by what we know about the virus and how it behaves”, Ghebreyesus said .

“We know that COVID-19 spreads fast, and we know that it is deadly – 10 times deadlier than the 2009 flu pandemic.

“We know that the virus can spread more easily in crowded environments like nursing homes.

“We know that early case-finding, testing, isolating caring for every case and tracing every contact is essential for stopping transmission.

“We know that in some countries, cases are doubling every 3 to 4 days”, said the WHO chief.

While COVID-19 accelerates very fast, it decelerates much more slowly.

“In other words, the way down is much slower than the way up”, Ghebreyesus stated.