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New Delhi: The national capital in the past few weeks has registered steady improvement in its Coronavirus situation with respect to fresh cases and positivity rate which may lead people to wonder whether lockdown put in place should be extended.
Within 5 weeks of lockdown, Delhi has seen Covid-19 daily cases steadily come down from a high of 26,000 to 3,000-6,000 this week, and the test positivity rate has also declined from a high of 36 percent to 5-7 percent during this period. However, the number of Covid fatalities continues to still be high, falling in the 200-300 range each day.
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The lockdown that began on April 18, has been extended by the Delhi government four times for a duration of 1 week each time. The current 1-week restrictions end on May 24.
Now that there is also an increase in the availability of ICU beds and ventilators in both private and public hospitals with the recovery rate rising, should the lockdown be extended?
To understand what the people of Delhi want, LocalCircles conducted another survey that received close to 9,000 responses from residents across all 11 districts of Delhi.
68 Percent Of Residents In Favour Of Extending Lockdown/Curfew By At Least 1 Week
In view of the 3,000 – 6,000 daily caseload and 5-7 percent test positivity rate in Delhi, the survey sought responses from residents of Delhi over the extension of lockdown/curfew after May 24.
In response 10 percent said “extend it by 3 weeks”, 26 percent said “extend it by 2 weeks”, and 32 percent said, “extend it by 1 week”. There were only 10 percent voting for “end the lockdown/curfew and remove all restrictions”, while 22 percent said, “end the lockdown/curfew and just impose night and weekend curfew.”
The findings of the poll indicate that 68 percent of Delhi residents are in favour of extending the lockdown/curfew by at least 1 week. This question in the survey received 8,878 responses.
Though the percentage of residents in favour of lockdown extension has dropped, 68 percent still support a 1-week extension:
LocalCircles survey conducted on March 28 had indicated that only 16 percent of Delhi residents were in favour of imposing the lockdown in the city.
With an unprecedented rise in cases, shortages of oxygen, and people seeing their contacts in social networks struggling to find hospital and ICU beds, Covid management drugs, etc. and losing their lives in many cases have now largely understood the criticality of the situation.
As a result, 59 percent on April 15 and 68 percent of residents surveyed on April 23 were in favour of a lockdown/curfew for at least 1 week. The percentage of residents of Delhi voting in favour of lockdown on April 29 was 75 percent, which increased to 85 percent on May 7 and fell to 74 percent on May 13.
Given the improving Covid situation, the percentage of residents of Delhi supporting lockdown has further decreased to 68 percent this week. Even though there has been a decline in percentage of citizens in favour of extending the lockdown, majority of Delhi residents are still in favour of extending the lockdown which ends on May 24. Key reasons behind this are cases of Mucormycosis or Black Fungus being on the rise, ventilator beds in top hospitals still difficult to secure and spread of prevalent B.1.617.2 variant which is reported to be highly transmissible.
Two weeks ago, residents via LocalCircles had demanded that the Government consider re-opening of small businesses in home delivery mode so that business disruption and consumer inconvenience be minimized.
In the discussion last week, both residents of Delhi and small businesses have reiterated this demand. It is important that the Delhi Government considers the same as the full reopening of activities will remain to be high risk. Similarly, people opined that all non-essential public places must continue to remain closed for the foreseeable future.
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