After the lockdown COVID-19 will spread even faster. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have a plan on how to deal with the acceleration in infection.
Sooner or later, the lockdown will have to be lifted, even if in phases. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee believe that after the lockdown the disease will start spreading at an accelerating rate, especially given that almost no one has immunity yet, large parts of India live in densely populated habitats where social distancing is not possible, and testing is limited.
They have come up with a 9 point plan to deal with the spread of the infection post the lockdown that involves creating awareness, encouraging reporting, training grass roots level health workers, processing data quickly and identifying hot spots, training and equipping teams of medical professionals who can move quickly into hotspots, roping in private hospitals and health workers, using JAM trinity for much larger direct benefit transfers, and continuing these efforts until a vaccine is available.
Read their detailed health policy prescription here.
Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee are Nobel laureates in Economics and professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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