Baijal recalls 5-day mandatory institutional quarantine order, stops short of confrontation with AAP Govt

Pandemic management is not about politics or a game of one-upmanship. If anything, there must be a unified command structure in protocol. What matters is the right judgment call. So Lieutenant Governor (LG) Anil Baijal has rightly withdrawn his earlier order of a five-day mandatory institutional quarantine for every COVID-19 patient in home care. He has clarified that all patients will be sent for home isolation, except in cases where symptoms require further hospitalisation or where the home set-up is not conducive to cure. Till now, the ICMR has permitted asymptomatic and mild symptom COVID-19 patients in the whole country to self-isolate at home. This was much in line with other countries and was done to ease the pressure on the already overcrowded quarantine centres being run by the Government. Naturally, the AAP Government had challenged the LG, terming his decision “arbitrary” and one that would “seriously harm” citizens. The fears of the Delhi Government were not unfounded as the city is already struggling to cope with the surge in the number of Coronavirus infections that for the first time since the pandemic began, recorded over 3,000 fresh cases in one day on June 19. So as it is the pressure on quarantine centres is bound to increase. With asymptomatic people and those with mild symptoms being forced to go to the quarantine centres, too, the entire infrastructure would have been thrown out of joint. As it is, there have been complaints of overcrowding and unhygienic conditions in State-run facilities. Some patients have avoided getting tested or fled because of the sorry state of affairs. As frontline workers fall prey to the virus, there is already an acute shortage of doctors and nurses to tend to serious COVID-19 cases. Where will the Government get more workers to look after those in the quarantine centres? With more people crammed into limited spaces, the risk of even those with mild symptoms getting a full-blown infection or some other disease grows exponentially.

Last week’s diktat was ill-advised and short-sighted to say the least. Also, despite a high-powered panel set up by Union Home Minister Amit Shah recommending fixing the cost of a COVID-19 isolation bed in private hospitals in Delhi in the range of Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000, this is not something that everyone will be able to afford, particularly in the present atmosphere of job losses, major salary cuts and uncertainty about continued employment. This will further burden the Government infrastructure. Imagine what institutional quarantine would do. This is not the time to question the Delhi Government’s every move for the sake of it. Anyway reason has prevailed. That’s all what we need.