DETECTION GAPS

aving reconciled to a three-week lockdown, most Indians waited anxiously on the morning of April 14 to hear how the prime minister would lift it—fully or incrementally—only to find that the shutdown had been extended by another 19 days. No one disputes the necessity of a lockdown—according to a study by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), one person can infect 406 people in 30 days if he or she doesn’t isolate—but at the end of three weeks, everyone is asking if the move did achieve what it had set out to do when it was imposed on March 24. The jury is still out. As India reported 12,338 cases and 420 deaths on April 16, it wasn’t clear if the country had managed to flatten the curve. “We still have to wait 7-10 more days to know if we have flattened the curve,” says K. Srinath Reddy, chairman of the Public Health Initiative of India (PHFI), a not-for-profit public-private initiative. “We can’t assess if the lockdown has been successful till more data is collected and analysed, especially age and state-specific data.” And there is only one way to get that