Dr Ravi Rannan-Eliya

By Rathindra Kuruwita 

Only China and New South Wales in Australia had so far managed to contain outbreaks of the Delta variant of COVID-19, Executive Director of the Institute for Health Policy (IHP), Dr Ravi Rannan-Eliya told The Island yesterday. “Given that even highly vaccinated countries, like the UK, the USA, and Israel are experiencing explosive outbreaks of Delta variant, Sri Lanka needs to be especially vigilant.

“We have also seen an outbreak in Singapore and that was sourced to the airport staff who had received the Pfizer vaccine. China has been battling a Delta outbreak in Guangdong province for just over a month and a half, but it appears their response has been effective. The number of cases is decreasing although this part of China is lagging behind other areas where vaccination is concerned.

In NSW, Australia, which had controlled the spread of the Delta variant, too, was lagging behind in vaccination, Dr. Rannan-Eliya said. “This means that managing the spread of Delta has little to do with vaccination. In both China and NSW they have limited lockdowns with people allowed to leave their homes/go shopping. Factories are operating in Guangdong, and in NSW there is still no requirement to wear masks outdoors”, he said.

“So, how are they doing this? Simple answer is aggressive testing, contact tracing and isolation. Guangdong has probably done over 50 million PCR tests during the past few weeks, and NSW also ramped up testing massively from 10,000 a day to over 60,000. Contrast this with our response to Delta. We are apparently doubling down on cutting testing, maybe with the mistaken hope that case numbers will fall as a result.”