We face a long struggle with Covid-19 that will last into 2021. Even if we control the current outbreak, fresh outbreaks will happen unless we completely close our borders for the rest of the year. We must think ahead to how we can maintain air links and continue to function in the face of a continuing threat of imported infections. Vastly increased capacity to test for Covid-19 has to be part of that. It will require a significant investment in equipment, supplies and manpower – billions of rupees, but the economic benefits will outweigh the costs.  Continue reading →

On Thursday 19 March, we reached a significant milestone in the current epidemic which should not go without comment.

China reported reported zero local cases throughout all its provinces including Hubei. The handful of cases it has had in the past few days have all been imported infections in visiting foreigners (mostly Italians) or returning Chinese. China is where the epidemic started three months ago, but it is now on the verge of being able to declare that first wave over and done with.

I wrote an article earlier to explain why the epidemic is no longer a Chinese problem. It was an attempt to alert everyone in Sri Lanka to the need to refocus on the infection threat from other countries, especially Europe. Unfortunately, it took over a week for me to get that published, and during that time the government continue to allow unrestricted arrivals from a range of countries with major and out-of-control outbreaks, such as the UK, France, Spain and Italy. As I wrote a few days ago, it is not therefore surprising that we ended up with the current outbreak with over 50 detected cases and almost certainly over a hundred undetected so far.

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We just came across this continuously updated tracker of Sri Lankan COVID cases developed by Isanka Wijerathne, a researcher at Kyoto University: http://covidsl.com. It reports current and changes in total cases, tests done and recovered patients. Continue reading →

Effective, strong and early action is critical at this time to prevent a large scale COVID-19 outbreak in Sri Lanka. Despite WHO advice to the contrary, travel restrictions have an important role to play, and are the most effective tool we have since we can still hope to prevent and contain a local epidemic. Unfortunately, despite taking early action to restrict and screen arrivals from China, Korea and Iran, the government delayed too long to impose further restrictions given what the data were saying. This and gaps in implementation have contributed to the sudden increase in cases starting on 10th March. Continue reading →