By Rathindra Kuruwita

Sri Lanka will see between 200 and 250 deaths a day in two to three weeks unless the government took drastic action to curb the spread of COVID-19, Prof. Suneth Agampodi, Founder Professor and Chair – Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka warns.

Prof. Agampodi told The Island they had developed a prediction model with two Sri Lankan colleagues in Harvard and MIT and the model predicted numbers six days back had been accurate.

“If we don’t take immediate action to curb the spread of the pandemic, we will see 200-250 deaths daily in two to three weeks.”

Prof. Agampodi called upon the government to impose full scale travel restrictions urgently. He added that the decision to make workers report for work and allow all gatherings including weddings was ill-advised.

Asked whether the government should have waited until a larger number of people were vaccinated before relaxing restrictions, Prof. Agampodi said that he agreed with the government that some restrictions needed to be removed.

“However, it was done in a completely irrational manner. A proper guideline for opening various sectors was prepared by at least three technical groups, but all those were ignored. Giving false assurance to people has also contributed to this situation. Even with 70-80% vaccination, we will still see widespread cases with the delta variant. We must not forget the importance of maintaining physical distance, wearing masks and other such measures.”

“We predicted this, weeks ago. The current wave is due to a highly infectious delta variant, and this has already exceeded the healthcare capacity. A considerable number of health staff are also infected with COVID. This will lead to exponential increase of covid related deaths and at least 50% additional excess deaths due to other causes. The situation could be catastrophic.