Social distancing is the key to corner Covid-19, says expert

The government has declared COVID-19 a ‘Notified Disaster’ and states and Union Territories have been asked to invoke provisions of Section 2 of Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, so that Health Ministry advisories are enforceable.

Various states have gone into a virtual shutdown, while many, including Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Uttarakhand, have closed schools and colleges.

With the rising number of coronavirus cases in the country, several state governments have announced a slew of preventive measures to curb further spread of the virus and enforced social distancing, Dr Naresh Purohit, Epidemiologist and Visiting Professor at the Kolkata based West Bengal University of Health Sciences, School of Public Health made the observation while delivering a lecture as a guest speaker at a National Seminar on "Challenges Posed by Covid-19 On Healthcare Economics" at Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata today.

Talking to UNI over phone after the lecture Dr Purohit said, 'Social Distancing will be the key phrase in the days and weeks to come.'

The term simply refers to avoiding close contact with other individuals in order to avoid catching the virus yourself and to avoid passing it on.

'Social distancing is currently the most important factor we can control in the COVID-19 outbreak, and therefore critical,' Dr Purohit explained.

Many factors contribute to the so-called reproductive number of the new coronavirus, which describes roughly how many people an infected individual will go on to infect. Currently, estimates of the reproductive number of the novel coronavirus range from 1.4 to 6.5, with an average of 3.3.

Dr Purohit who is also Executive Member of the Federation of Hospital Administrators, revealed in his lecture that healthcare industry will suffer on one hand due to the fall in the arrival of international patients while may gain on the other due to increase in the number of patients.

Some of the patients who turn out to be positive for Covid-19 virus will have to be admitted to the hospital. However, most of the hospitals do not have sufficient number of isolation beds and therefore the scope of admitting patients with the private hospitals is very less.

Patients who were due to get admitted for planned procedures may postpone their surgery and this will cause much more damage to the bottom lines of the healthcare industry. Smaller hospitals may benefit much more due to the rush in the OPD’s but the bigger tertiary care hospitals have much more to lose than to gain from the spread of this virus.

'The Indian economy which is already in doldrums with falling GDP and a very high unemployment rate is hardly in a position to cushion this blow,' Dr Purohit averred.

During the lecture, he pointed out that the healthcare industry in these times will have to cut down the costs and two of the major cost heads for any multi-speciality hospital are the medical costs and the marketing costs.

While the medical costs constitute the amount of money paid to the consultants out of the total revenue, the marketing costs are the referral fee paid to the facilitators who bring patients to the bigger hospitals. The medical costs are in the range of 25-30 per cent where there is a scope of slashing them by 5% which does not mean that the income of the consultants should come down.

Rather more patients should be sent to the consultants during the same working hours so that their income levels are not affected even when these costs are brought down. Traditionally the hospitals have been spending anywhere between 10-35 per cent of their revenue on the referral fee which should be replaced by direct marketing where the cost of acquisition is hardly five per cent.

'These are testing times for any industry and demands innovative solutions and swift decisions. Those who keep sitting on their haunches and wait for the turnaround would surely get wiped out during the dark days of depression which are just round the corner,' Dr Purohit cautioned.