Meghalaya mulls strategy to micro-manage the spread of COVID-19: CM

Syllad | The Rising MeghalayaJuly 16, 2020

The state government is all set to come up with strategies to “micro-manage” the COVID-19 pandemic to help the state avoid from having frequent lockdowns, which have adversely impacted the economic activities of the people in the past three months.

The issue was discussed at a joint meeting held between the state government and opposition MLAs held on Thursday, after the state continued to witness a spike in the number of COVID-19 positive cases.

“The government is continuously working on how to micro-manage different situations (arising of COVID-19 pandemic). We need to have micro-management, micro lockdown, and a quick response system because COVID-19 is a situation which we will face in the future also,” Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma told reporters.

“When a case or cluster suddenly comes up, should the whole state and city be locked down, should all economic activities be stopped? Therefore, we need to adjust, adapt and learn how to live with this virus as we cannot expect that we will continue to run away from it or lockdown everytime,” he said.

Stating that the concept of micro-management of COVID-19 is at a nascent stage, the chief minister however said, “We realize that this is the way forward and the point is simple that the only way for the state to be ready (to tackle the COVID-19) is to have a quick response system, which is very micro so that whenever it (cases) happen, it can be contained in that house or locality.”

“Therefore, we need to find out (strategies) on how we could have a micro-lockdown strategy, individual lockdown and how individual actions and behaviors could make a vast difference. So we are trying to work on this and we have started taking steps by involving the headmen,” he said.

Sangma said the government will not only share information of the COVID-19 positive patients but also information of the high risk contacts to the headmen of the different villages to contain the spread of the virus.

“If government and all elected representatives and society in general can work together to ensure we are able to micro-manage the different lockdowns that we do at the micro level and really contain it to the positive patients and high risk contacts, I think we can slowly adapt,” he said.