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Saving Lives and Livelihoods Amidst a Once-in-a-Century Crisis 3

COVID-19: ONCE IN A CENTURY ‘CRISIS’
1.1 The world has endured a year of the unexpected onslaught by the novel COVID-19 virus -
SARS-CoV-2 - first identified in Wuhan city of China in December 2019. The virus has posed an
unprecedented challenge for policy making, globally and nationally. It has tested the mettle of
policymakers to deal with uncertain, fluid, complex and dynamic situations having far-reaching
socio-economic implications. It has also tested the frontiers of medical science, which rose to
the challenge by developing an effective vaccine within a year.
1.2 The pattern and trends in spread of the virus across major countries showed that confirmed
cases spread exponentially once community transmission began. Understanding the disease
dynamics posed challenges as a large fraction of affected people were asymptomatic but were
potentially contributing to the spread of the pandemic. By the end of February 2020, the infection
had spread to over 54 countries, infected more than 85,403 individuals across the world and
resulted in around 3,000 deaths. The exponential rise in the number of cases being witnessed daily
compelled the World Health Organization (WHO) to title this outbreak a pandemic on March 11,
2020 – within a period of three months of its emergence. Within a year, it has infected around 9.6
crore people growing at an average rate of 3.3 per cent per day. The number of daily cases is still
rising with more than 6 lakh cases per day. The pandemic has accounted for 20.5 lakh death across
220 countries with a global case fatality rate of 2.2 per cent as of 15 January 2020. However, in
th
the initial stages of the pandemic, the world average case fatality rate (CFR) was much higher at
5-6 per cent (Figure 1). These features have made the virus lethal.

Figure 1: Global Trend in COVID-19 Spread and Case Fatality Rates

Source: Data accessed from World Health Organisation (WHO)– as on 31 December, 2020
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1.3 The only strategy that seemed viable for containment of the pandemic was active surveillance,
early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread
by practicing social distancing and safety precautions. Various non-pharmaceutical interventions
(NPIs) – such as lockdowns, closure of schools and non-essential business, travel restrictions – were,
therefore, adopted by countries across the globe. These were aimed to slow down the transmission of
infection or ‘flatten the epidemic curve’ and buy the health care system some time to handle the surge
in demand for its services and for development of an effective treatment and a vaccine (Box 1).

1.4 The global health crisis prompted by COVID-19, in addition to an enormous human toll,
has engendered the largest economic shock the world economy has witnessed in the last century.
The pandemic and associated lockdown measures led to a de facto shutdown of a significant