Via The Washington Post: India Kerala coronavirus: How the Communist state flattened its covid-19 curve. Excerpt (but the whole article):
NEW DELHI — For hours, the health worker ticked through a list of questions: How is your health? What is your state of mind? Are you running out of any food supplies? By the end of the afternoon, she had reached more than 50 people under coronavirus quarantine. Weeks earlier, that number was 200.
Sheeba T.M. was just one of more than 30,000 health workers in the Indian state of Kerala, part of the Communist state government’s robust response to the coronavirus pandemic. Other efforts include aggressive testing, intense contact tracing, instituting a longer quarantine, building thousands of shelters for migrant workers stranded by the sudden nationwide shutdown and distributing millions of cooked meals to those in need.
The measures appear to be paying off. Even though Kerala was the first state to report a coronavirus case in late January, the number of new cases in the first week of April dropped 30 percent from the previous week. With just two deaths, 34 percent of positive patients have recovered in the state, higher than elsewhere in India.
The success in Kerala could prove instructive for the Indian government, which has largely shut down the country to stop the spread of the contagion but continues to see the curve trend upward, with more than 6,700 confirmed cases and more than 200 deaths. Its challenges are plenty — from high population density to poor health care facilities — but experts say Kerala’s proactive measures like early detection and broad social support measures could serve as a model for the rest of the country.
“We hoped for the best but planned for the worst,” said K.K. Shailaja, the state’s health minister, while cautioning that the pandemic is not yet over in Kerala. “Now, the curve has flattened, but we cannot predict what will happen next week.”
Kerala’s approach was effective because it was “both strict and humane,” said Shahid Jameel, a virologist and infectious disease expert.
“Aggressive testing, isolating, tracing and treating — those are ways of containing an outbreak,” said Jameel, who is also the CEO of Wellcome Trust, a health research foundation.
Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization’s representative in India, attributed Kerala’s “prompt response” to its past “experience and investment” in emergency preparedness and pointed to measures such as district monitoring, risk communication and community engagement.
The state faced a potentially disastrous challenge: a disproportionately high number of foreign arrivals. Popular for its tranquil backwaters and health retreats, the coastal state receives more than 1 million foreign tourists a year. One-sixth of its 33 million citizens are expatriates, and hundreds of its students study in China.
Screening at airports was tightened, and travelers from nine countries — including coronavirus hotspots such as Iran and South Korea — were required to quarantine at home starting on Feb. 10, two weeks before India put similar restrictions into place. In one instance, more than a dozen foreign nationals were removed from a flight before takeoff because they had not completed their isolation period. Temporary quarantine shelters were established to accommodate tourists and other nonresidents.
