COVID-19: Modi government to declare national lockdown all across the country?

In an unprecedented measure, the Narendra Modi led government is likely to announce a nationwide lockdown all across the country to curb the spread of COVID-19. Underlining the “alarming rise in daily number of active cases” and “a sharp growth of 10.2% in the number of deaths”, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Saturday said “the widening gap between daily new cases and daily new recoveries reflects that the infection is spreading at a much faster rate than recoveries with consistently growing active cases”. At present, Maharashtra and Delhi are the worst affected states. The situation  also looks grim in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Therefore the govt is mulling the idea of a complete lockdown to bring the situation under control. At a meeting to review the availability of oxygen, ventilators, manpower, medicines and hospital beds in 11 states/UT reporting a surge in Covid-19 cases, Harsh Vardhan said: “India is currently reporting the sharpest growth rate of 7.6% in new Covid cases, which is 1.3 times higher than case growth rate of 5.5% reported in June 2020.” 

Harshvardhan interacted with the state health ministers through video-conferencing and majority of them were of the opinion that a complete lockdown is the need of the hour. Therefore a complete lockdown like the one announced by Modi in March 2020 is likely to happen. On the other hand, with elections  underway in West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee led state were voting is still to be completed an exception will be made so that the voting stands unaffected. Till now in West Bengal voting for five phases have been successfully done with three phases still remaining. Moreover, voting in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu has come to an end, thus except for some parts of West Bengal the entire country will go under complete lockdown. The government officials are of the opinion that any further delay will make the situation worse. 

In March 2020, Narendra Modi had announced a national lockdown for 21 days, all across the country. Every state, district, and village across India was under strict lockdown.  Modi's announcement came at a time when the number of positive Covid-19 cases were  increasing across states. PM Modi, during his address, had said that even developed nations are struggling to control the spread of the novel coronavirus and if the situation got out of hand, India would have to pay an unimaginable price. Maharashtra one of the worst affected states in the county, on Saturday registered yet another highest single-day spike in its daily tally of the coronavirus disease  with 67,123 new cases in the last 24 hours. Almost 420 people succumbed to the disease while 56,783 recovered during the same period. The state’s caseload is nearing 3.8 million with 59,970 deaths, 3,061,174 recoveries and 647,933 active cases, the bulletin showed. More than 272,000 tests were conducted across Maharashtra in the last 24 hours which led to the detection of the news cases, it added. Being the worst-affected state across India since the beginning of the pandemic last year, Maharashtra’s health infrastructure is massively overburdened to handle the current spike in cases and deaths. In order to curb the spread of the disease, the state has been placed under night curfew, weekend lockdown and Section 144. The Maha Vikas Aghadi-led government in Maharashtra has raised the issue of shortage of oxygen and the antiviral drug Remdesivir to treat the infected patients. Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray rang up Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday to inform him about the shortage of these two components.