Five months since the first positive case of COVID-19 was reported in Kerala, the Indian state of 35 million people reported 4189 cases of COVID-19 as of 30 June 2020 and 23 deaths, with an impressive recovery rate of 51.7%.
The state government’s prompt response to COVID-19 can be attributed to experience and investment made in emergency preparedness and outbreak response in the past, notably after severe flooding in Kerala in 2018 and a Nipah virus outbreak in 2019.
The state used innovative approaches and its experience in disaster management planning.
Active surveillance, setting up of district control rooms for monitoring, capacity-building of frontline health workers, risk communication and strong community engagement, and addressing the psychosocial needs of the vulnerable population are some of the key strategic interventions implemented by the state government that kept the disease in control.
Early release of technical guidelines on contact tracing, quarantine, isolation, hospitalization, infection prevention and control, and extensive capacity-building for all cadres of health and other interlinked departments played a critical role in managing the situation.
WHO had been a long-standing partner in the field of public health and WHO officials were part of the response at state and district level.
WHO field officials previously supported the Government in strengthening disease surveillance in the private sector during the 2018 Kerala floods.
Experience and lessons learned from those experiences have proved very useful as the same team continued to support the COVID-19 response and were committed to working with the Government of Kerala in its fight against the disease.
The WHO India office also coordinated with the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research, and Indian Society of Clinical Research to organize a webinar on Ethics Review of Biomedical Projects during a pandemic, focused on the need for quality research outcomes and adopting new research methodologies to respond to humanitarian emergencies.
The webinar brought together 400 key stakeholders, including ethics committee members, clinical research and healthcare professionals, patients, patient representative groups and students.
Experts from the WHO Country Office in India reiterate that conducting research on new medications or vaccines during a pandemic was essential, and research ethics committees needed to be prepared to review research projects in a time-bound manner.