By Rathindra Kuruwita

The government had not set any objectives to achieve during the current lockdown, and therefore it was likely that automatic benefits of the lockdown would be lost soon, Pharmaceutical and healthcare management consultant Dr. Sanjaya Perera told The Island yesterday.

He said that instead of imposing a lockdown due to external pressure, the government should have imposed restrictions with the aim of achieving set objectives. A number of medical experts had already highlighted what activities should accompany a lockdown, Dr. Perera said.

“The lockdown will surely help the health sector recover a bit. The staff is exhausted because of the rapidly increasing patients. Hundreds of health staff had contracted COVID-19 themselves. The 10 days gives the health staff an opportunity to recover and some of the health staff who had contracted the virus will be cured and can return to work by 30 August. However, the question is what have we done to improve the facilities and the capabilities of the staff,” he asked.

Dr. Perera said that the past week could have been used to increase wards for coronavirus patients, interim care centres and improve health staff wellbeing. The fact that those requirements were not attended to, showed that the government had gone into the lockdown without any set objectives.

He said medical experts had also urged the government to test at least 30,000 families per district to identify areas where the spread of COVID-19 was less. The lockdown could have been used to test 750,000 families in the 25 districts and the results could have helped the government to identify areas which were not affected by COVID-19.

“These less affected areas can be Orange Zones. The health officers could take steps to secure these Orange Zones and slowly expand upon these areas. This was in about six months, we could create a significant amount of areas that one can operate with relative freedom. However, we have reduced testing,” he said.

Dr. Perera said that a large number of people keep on coming to the cities even during the lockdown and with about three million people working the purpose of a lockdown is defeated. Private enterprises also needed to act with greater responsibility and understand that bringing in clerical staff to work at present was a waste of resources and only made the economic recovery of the country more difficult.

“I have heard of instances where people have been asked to come to work when they were showing COVID symptoms. And mind you this was an IT firm. The government must make a serious attempt to stop this inflow of people into major cities,” he said.

Once the lockdown was over, most of the public and private institutions would pretend that things were back to normal, bring in workers who could essentially carry out all their tasks from home and soon all the gains from the lockdown would be gone, he said.