Rahul continues talk shows with health experts

| | New Delhi
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Rahul continues talk shows with health experts

Thursday, 28 May 2020 | PNS | New Delhi

A day after he dubbed India’s lockdown a failure citing increase in Covid-19 cases during the period, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday continued with his talk shows with experts from across the world on issues related to the pandemic. Professor Ashish Jha of Harvard University and Professor Johan Giesecke of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute told him that “lockdown is not a goal” but a time to separate infected persons from non-infected ones, when you can't test aggressively and that a severe lockdown can cause more deaths than the illness.

“Lockdown buys you time, but lockdown is not the goal unto itself. You can use that time to prepare a really fabulous testing, tracing, isolation infrastructure. You want to use that time to communicate with people," said Jha.

The Harvard Professor further said that vigorous testing, tracing and isolation is helpful, "but if you can’t do that, then you have to lock everything down”. “Can you slow down the virus from a lockdown? Of course you can. But it has very substantial economic repercussions," he said. Left unchecked, the virus will grow exponentially, he stresed.

“And the way to stop it is to take infected people and separate them from un-infected ones," advocated Jha adding life will be very different when lockdown ends.

"This is not about going back to what life was like last May or June. That life over the next 6-12-18 months is going to look very different," he said.

In his interaction with Prof Giesecke, Rahul said, "Most places that are affected (by the pandemic) are nerve centres of globalisation. If people say 9/11 is a chapter, coronavirus is a book."

Rahul began his series of conversations via video conferences with experts last month. Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee were among his first few guests.

“India would ruin its economy if it has a very severe lockdown”, Professor Giesecke said adding that coronavirus, which is a "very mild disease", will affect "almost everyone in the world".

“The disease is very mild. Most people who have it are not even aware. While the old and vulnerable need to be protected from the disease, you may cause more deaths due to a severe lockdown than the illness," he added as Rahul spoke about the plight of the migrants.

As the Gandhi scion questioned both the experts on an exit strategy for the lockdown, he was told that a "stepwise exit" is more advisable.

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