No time to hide. Need to document Covid-19 handling at local level: J Radhakrishnan

J Radhakrishnan, Principal Secretary for Cooperation, Food and Consumer Protection, Tamil Nadu, said there is a need to document the experience of handling the Covid-19 pandemic at the district level.

Launching the second edition of the book ‘No Time To Hide — Covid-19’, he said such experiences should be made available to common people for them to reflect and improve.  Radhakrishnan was the Principal Secretary of the Health and Family Welfare Department of Tamil Nadu during the peak of the pandemic.  

Authored by former journalist Ashok Nilakantan, the book chronicles the history of SARS-COV2, which causes coronavirus disease, from its outbreak in the Hubei province of China and how it became endemic and quickly spread across the globe and declared as pandemic by WHO in January 2020.

The 2^nd edition traces how the worst affected countries met the challenges day to day from the onset of the disease in 2019-20 till 2022, containment through lockdowns and shutdowns of businesses and roll-out of vaccines. There are special chapters on how China launched Zero Tolerance for Covid after the second wave and sub-variants such as the Omicron BA, BA3.

“Some of the worst affected countries such as the USA, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Russia and China had their health care systems virtually crippled. Case studies of these countries are detailed in the book,” Nilakantan said. 

Between 2019 and 2022, the Covid-19 pandemic claimed over five million lives and affected 50 million people across the globe.

COMMENT NOW