With Covid-19 cases seeing a substantial decline in the national capital, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday said that the ‘unlock’ process in the city will gradually begin from 5 am on Monday. Construction activities and factories will be allowed to reopen first, he said, while cautioning people to be careful so that the infection does not spiral out of control again.
The Delhi government had announced a lockdown on 19 April, a day before cases touched a peak of over 28,000 and the positivity rate was above 30 per cent. It has been extended every week since.
The CM said, “The people of Delhi have cooperated, and over the past month we have managed to bring down the number of cases in the city as well as the positivity rate… It was decided in a Delhi Disaster Management Authorities (DDMA) meeting chaired by Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal that the lockdown will slowly be lifted starting 5 am on Monday.”
“The result of the hard work of 20 million people in Delhi is that we have controlled this second wave in one month. In the last 24 hours there has been an infection rate of around 1.5% and there are about 1,100 new cases. There are a lot of beds available in the hospitals,” Kejriwal added.
Explaining the reasons for initiating the unlock process, he said, “It is time to unlock slowly because lest people escape the corona but die of starvation. There is a need to balance. Today, the Delhi Disaster Management Authority met. The first thing in this is that now the process of opening the lockdown in Delhi will start gradually. Corona has come under control with great effort and difficulty but the entire battle has not been won. It should not be that the gains made in the last one month go in vain, so everyone believes that it should be opened slowly.”
The government is initiating the unlock process to give Delhi an economic boost, but the concern that the infection rate may increase again is very much there. The government is trying to do a balancing act between lives and livelihoods, especially with the working class in mind.
Kejriwal said, “We have to take care of the people who work on the daily basis. Such labourers see us working in the construction sector and factories. It has been decided that these two activities will be opened from Monday. Every week we get suggestions from the public. Based on the views of the experts, we will continue the unlock process slowly so that there is no spike in Covid cases again. If the cases start growing again, we will have to stop this process. So, all of us need to take precaution.”
He further reiterated that the lockdown is imposed under compulsion, urging people not to “leave the house unless needed”.
In Delhi, the Covid-19 graph has been going down. In the last 24 hours, there were 1,141 new cases of corona, while in the same period 139 people died from the infections. With this the positivity rate came to 1.59%.