Rushing out of coronavirus lockdown is laden with risk; India would do well to study Hokkaido case

On Tuesday, India saw its largest single-day spike in both, the number of fresh coronavirus positive cases (3,875) and deaths (194).

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Tuesday also happened to be the second day of what some parts of the the media are calling ‘Lockdown 3.0’ — the edition of the nationwide curfew to feature the greatest degree of loosening of restrictions on citizens living in the green and orange zones thus far.

While Tuesday’s numbers represent fresh cases and deaths for just a solitary day — making for an inadequate sample size — what they do serve to do is act as an indicator of what could happen if Indians get carried away by the easing of the lockdown and rush out of their homes without a care in the world.

There are lessons to be learnt from the experience of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where it was initially believed that a timely lockdown had contained the COVID-19 threat. It may be recalled that the Hokkaido prefecture had declared its own state of emergency on 28 February — over a month before Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (on 7 April) declared a state of emergency in other parts of the country.

By 19 March, however, Hokkaido — assuming the curve had been flattened and that cases were subsiding — had lifted its own curfews and life had begun returning to normal. A second wave of infections caused the imposition of another lockdown. “Now I regret it, we should not have lifted the first state of emergency,” chairman of the Hokkaido Medical Association Dr Kiyoshi Nagase  told   Time . The magazine also quoted Kazuto Suzuki, vice-dean of International Politics at Hokkaido University, as saying, “That’s what we now know: Even if you control the first wave, you can’t relax.”

Before the Indian government considers further relaxations in the present lockdown, it would do well to visit the Hokkaido example.