Focus more on epidemiological surveillance

While conducting an epidemiological surveillance is crucial to understand and fight the outbreak of an extremely contagious disease like Covid-19, it is worrying that we are yet to carry out any such surveillance to handle the outbreak of the disease in the country. With such a surveillance mechanism in place, public health professionals can continuously gather, analyse and interpret data about the disease, and disseminate their findings to relevant agencies. If we had a surveillance mechanism in place, our public health officials could have made suggestions to the government about the next course of action—when and how the ongoing shutdown should be relaxed or withdrawn, which area is highly vulnerable and what measures to take, etc. 

While by now the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) should have conducted the surveillance and let the government and the policymakers know their findings, unfortunately, they have only started their work in this regard. In the meantime, the government has reopened factories and businesses without having any comprehensive scientific findings on the actual coronavirus situation in the country. Now, the decision to reopen may become dangerous for us as it has been taken only considering our economic condition and without taking into account any epidemiological evidence, which could help check the infection rate, decipher how many of a representative group of people of a community have generated antibodies to fight the virus, determine the magnitude of the pathogen's spread in the broader population and also shed light on how the virus has been transmitted among people. Thus, any future decision to relax the shutdown should be taken after we have an epidemiological surveillance in place.

So far, the IEDCR has made their projections based on the trends of the identified cases only. But in order to get an accurate picture of the Covid-19 outbreak in the country, there is no alternative to conducting surveillance. Therefore, we urge the IEDCR to focus more on research and the ongoing epidemiological surveillance of Covid-19 which should be completed as soon as possible as it is crucial to containing the pandemic in the country.