Immediately after detection of first case on April 1, the local municipal acted swiftly. The municipal corporation barricaded the entrance and exit to the slum cluster, carried out disinfection of 425 public toilets, and began door-to-door screening, robust surveillance, engaging private doctors in containment activities, partnering with NGOs for building community trust and providing food to needy population, ramping up quarantine and treatment facilities, and implementation of strictest lockdown to slow down the spread of the pandemic.
The Dharavi model becomes the template for the policymakers and public health practitioner globally for breaking the chain of transmission and flattening the curve in densely packed urban slum communities around the world. This is also important to note that Dharavi model is ideal of setting where social distancing is impossible or difficult to follow.
Dharavi was able to successfully flatten the curve in 2 months with its COVID-19 response strategy of actively following four T’s—tracing, tracking, testing, and treating. This approach included activities like proactive screening and robust surveillance.
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The first large facility that the administration took over in Dharavi was the Rajiv Gandhi Sports Complex with 300 beds. A total of 9500 people have been placed under quarantine. Due to isolation and uncertainties about the infection, people quarantined were under enormous mental health crisis. The administration organized yoga, aerobics, and breathing exercise session for boosting immunity and reducing mental stress.
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The coronavirus pandemic has shown us the importance of public and private sectors partnership during an emergency response [10]. Pandemics, like COVID-19, necessitate catalyzing make-shift and long-term PPPs to remediate unprecedented burdens on the healthcare system.
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A key feature of the containment strategy was ensuring uninterrupted supply of essential food items and groceries. Around 70% of Dharavi’s population comprises daily wage earners, most of them, with little or no savings. With the help of NGOs and philanthropist, essential ration and food packets were arranged for needy population. This approach has generated significant community capacity to respond to resiliently during the coronavirus crisis.
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A collaboration of public, private, people's will, and respect for science (and virus) was the key to success where the world's most powerful country with CDC, money, and technology failed (and still failing).
Robert H. Frank in his book The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good uses Elk's antler's as an analogy for lack of better term (mine) - a world view driven by fanatical idealogy.
A faster gazelle is better equipped to outrun a cheetah, and being faster-conferred advantages for both the individual and the species. Antlers, on the other hand, are used for fighting with other males. The pressure to have bigger ones than your rivals leads to an arms race that consumes resources that could have been used more efficiently for other things, such as fighting off disease. As a result, every male ends up with a cumbersome and expensive pair of antlers, and “life is more miserable for bull elk as a group.”
E.O Wilson's in his book Social Conquest of Earth, calls for a "New Enlightenment":
I think we ought to have another go at the Enlightenment and use that as a common goal to explain and understand ourselves, to take that self-understanding which we so sorely lack as a foundation for what we do in the moral and political realm. This is a wonderful exercise. It is about education, science, evaluating the creative arts, learning to control the fires of organized religion, and making a better go of it.
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