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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nikdw" data-source="post: 25351989" data-attributes="member: 558781">Opinion: “We must speak the truth – the lockdown failed and we need fresh thinking”Dr Ravi Rannan-Eliya, Executive Director,Insitute for Health PolicyGiven what we know about the new cases detected in the past two weeks, it was no longer justifiable to relax COVID control measures, including lifting the curfew in Colombo. This is a monumental and totally avoidable policy failure and an unmitigated fiasco.If accountability meant anything in this country, there would have been consequences for those involved in setting the health response. And to be absolutely clear, I do not mean the President, who has so far only acted in good faith on the advice he has been given.When the government imposed an island-wide curfew on the evening of March 20, we only had 72 cases. Until that point, almost all were people who had acquired the infection overseas and returned before we stopped all incoming flights on March 19. There were just a dozen other cases of local transmission, involving people in the community who had been infected directly or indirectly by a local arrival or foreign tourist.The curfew should have had three clear objectives:(1) To contain the virus to arrivals — This required screening all recent arrivals for infection and rapidly tracing and safely quarantining all cases and contacts of infected arrivals or any other cases to stop dead the spread of virus to others.(2) To establish capacity and a system to rapidly detect, trace and isolate any cases of hidden infection in the community.(3) To reduce social interaction so as to slow down person-to-person spread of any virus lurking in the population long enough for the first two objectives to be achieved.</blockquote>

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