On Sunday, April 4, the Maharashtra Government announced a complete lockdown on weekends along with new weekday restrictions that will last throughout April. These plans were somewhat kept a secret during a top-level review meeting chaired by the Cabinet Secretary on April 2.
This, according to senior officials, is because of the fact that the central government had advised the state roughly two weeks ago that weekend lockdowns are unlikely to work and may have “limited impact” in mitigating the spread of the coronavirus.
“The Chief Secretary, Maharashtra, received the largest chunk of time during the Cabinet Secretary meeting. However, no one discussed any imposition of a weekend lockdown,” a government source who was present at the meeting said to The Indian Express.
Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan had written to Chief Secretary Sitaram Kunte on March 15 that the state’s focus should firmly be on containment and not lockdowns. “Measures such as night curfews, weekend lockdowns, have very limited impact on containing/ suppressing the transmission. Hence the district administration should focus on strict and effective containment strategy,” the letter said.
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India reported its highest daily COVID-19 cases with 1,03,558 new infections detected. “Eight states including Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab have shown a steep rise in the Covid daily new cases. 81.90% of the new cases are reported from these 8 states,” the Union Health Ministry said in a release.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra accounted for 55.11 per cent of the cases reported on Monday, alarming citizens and health officials. There have been proposals to extend vaccinations for younger people so as to build an effective net around the virus. However, this will require approval from the Centre.
Justifying its decision to impose new restrictions, a senior official in the Maharashtra government said, “The rationale to impose the lockdown was after an assessment made by the public health department. The biggest issue was that the people had become indifferent to the idea of Covid-19 appropriate behaviour, despite the increase in the number of daily active cases.”
Other state officials added their projections indicated the state’s health infrastructure may be overwhelmed if cases continue to mount by April 17.
“That projection was made on two sets of parameters: number of beds and requirement of oxygen. Our experts projected that if this rise continues, in terms of beds, the system will be overwhelmed by April 17,” an unnamed source said.
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The Centre had also asked Maharashtra on March 15 to prepare for a worst-case scenario in case there’s a new spike in cases. Further, the Centre said that the collection of fines for violating COVID-19 guidelines have dipped in Maharashtra despite the surge in cases. Officials said that this indicates that authorities in the state aren’t strictly enforcing the rules put in place to curb the spread of the virus.
“During the meeting, it was pointed out that in all of those 11 states which are a matter of serious concern, except Delhi and Karnataka, enforcement and fine, related Covid-19 violations, have gone down month after month. We told these states that the enforcement action is not commensurate and that there was no strict enforcement of Covid-19 appropriate behaviour,” a source familiar with the matter said.
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