Delhi’s COVID-19 journey so far: A telltale saga of Shah’s brilliance and Kejriwal’s massive blunders

COVID-19 is here to stay and although the recovery rate is constantly improving in India, the daily spikes are only getting bigger taking the total to well over 11 lakh.

The silver lining, however, is Delhi that after being among the top five contributors to coronavirus cases in India seems to be doing slightly better. At least for now. 

According to fresh data, the total number of COVID-19 cases in Delhi presently stands at around 1.25 lakh with around 3600 deaths. But significantly the number of active cases in the national capital has dropped below 19,000. More than a lakh of those affected by the virus have recuperated, thereby catapulting the overall recovery rate to around 84 per cent. 

So if the current situation were to be summarised, it would be safe to say that Delhi has managed to pull off a minor victory but is nowhere close to being out of the woods yet. 

Ideally, the Aam Aadmi Party government, with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at the helm of affairs, would like to wear the victory crown. But the bitter truth is that the Delhi administration has been found wanting in its handling of the pandemic - so much so that in desperation the Deputy CM of Delhi Manish Sisodia had prophesied a doomsday scenario that by the end of July the city would have more than five and a half lakh coronavirus cases. It is the twilight of July already and for Delhi to reach that number vis-a-vis the current tally, it will need to outperform the rest of the world. Looks highly improbable. 

Clearly, the Kejriwal government had developed a defeatist attitude in the COVID battle, leaving Delhi on tenterhooks until the MHA stepped in and took charge of the proceedings. The performance of the AAP government was so abysmal that even the anti-Modi leftist media could not stop itself from being critical of the Delhi CM and his brigade. 

How Amit Shah’s intervention turned the tables on COVID-19 in Delhi 

Amit Shah’s intervention in Delhi came at a time when the city was grappling with the onslaught of COVID-19. An outrageous decision by the Kejriwal government to reserve Delhi hospital beds only for Delhi residents, which was later revoked by Lt Governor Anil Baijal, prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take control via the Ministry of Home Affairs. 

With cases peaking around the mid of June, when Amit Shah chaired a meeting of all stakeholders of Delhi, Kejriwal welcomed the intervention. Such was their cluelessness about tacking the pandemic situation in Delhi that AAP which normally gets critical of the Centre at the drop of a hat happily agreed to let the Home Minister take over the charge of the capital. 

One of the most crucial steps taken after Shah’s intervention was the ramping up of COVID-19 testing in Delhi. Whereas halfway through June from the start of April around 3 lakh people were tested, the number of tests done daily was increased to 20,000 and as many as 2.5 lakh people were tested in the latter half of June. 

Significantly, the cost of testing in private labs was brought down from Rs 4,500 to Rs 2,400. Paul Committee which was created under the chairmanship of Dr. V.K. Paul, a member of the Niti Ayog, capped the treatment cost of corona patients in private hospitals between Rs 8000 and Rs 18,000. 

A huge shortcoming in Kejriwal’s blueprint was the lack of aggressive contact-tracing. It led to a steep climb in COVID positive detections between May and June. But under Amit Shah, serological surveillance was set up to keep a track of the spread of the virus. It served as a shot in the arm in the crucial exercise of contact-tracing. 

After June 14, more than 20,000 beds for COVID-19 patients were added to the infrastructure that comprised of less than 10,000 beds. 500 railway coaches were turned into 8000 beds. The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) stepped in as the nodal agency to take over the COVID-19 care centre at the Radha Soami Satsang Beas in the Chattarpur area of New Delhi. ITBP team converted the Ashram into a 10,000-bed facility. Moreover, the medical staff of the armed forces in DRDO managed over 1000 beds. Additionally, 500 oxygen cylinders and ventilators and 10,000 oximeters were arranged by the MHA. 

Delhi government’s COVID blunders - a flashback! 

In the first week of May when the coronavirus cases in Delhi were just under 5000, a super optimistic Arvind Kejriwal had made tall claims about the city being ready to open up and the government having the requisite resource to deal with the pandemic. But the bubble burst soon as Delhi’s COVID tally went beyond 50,000 by the second week of June. What went wrong?… Pretty much everything. 

What looked like a promising start in the corona battle for the AAP government despite the Tablighi Markaz event and the Anand Vihar blemish, it soon turned into a sad saga of public health and governance lapses. 

Delhi’s COVID positivity saw a marked rise in June. As the daily testing was increased, the positivity rate shot up and the number of per day positive cases rose to a whopping 3000. By the end of June, the total number of COVID-19 cases in Delhi was close to 90,000, the highest among the country’s megacities.

The fact of the matter is that Delhi exceeded Mumbai’s COVID-19 count only because the Delhi administration failed to use the 2-month lockdown period to consolidate its action-plan and ramp-up facilities. There was no intent at all. The AAP government could not ensure a substantial arrangement of beds, deliver enough PPE and COVID testing kits, and left a lot to be desired about the migrant crisis. 

Arguably the biggest blunder Kejriwal committed was that of not making contact-tracing a priority. The strategy of creating small containment zones without doing door to door search failed miserably. This was further aggravated by the lack of follow-up on those placed under home-quarantine. Delhi government’s complacency level was so high that the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) had to make physical verification of home isolation cases mandatory to ensure that quarantine norms were being complied with. 

Unlike cities such as Mumbai and Ahmedabad, Delhi has a sizeable workforce of more than 3000 ASHA Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) trained and equipped to perform field-level functions. Hence, it is baffling as to why the importance of contact-tracing and physical verification was royally overlooked, something that Shah took extremely seriously. 

As a result of all the botch-ups mentioned above, the pandemic situation in Delhi deteriorated, leaving Arvind Kejriwal and his team exposed. It entangled the AAP government in its web of hyperbole. Turned out that the CM’s claim of the availability of 30,000 beds, being monetarily ready to buy PPE kits in bulk numbers and having enough resource to take care of lakhs of poor migrants was only a stunt to grab eye-balls when in reality Delhi was far from being ready to tackle a health emergency.

The freebie-politics of AAP had dented Delhi’s financial reserves so deep that the same government that once boasted about providing everything free of cost had to resort to the opening of liquor shops to keep its economy afloat. What transpired afterwards was chaos outside liquor outlets in various parts of the city. SOPs were flouted and social distancing went for a toss. There was a sudden surge in the number of COVID positive cases during this period. 

No less than the highest court of the country gave the Delhi government a wrap on the knuckles for being insensitive in handling the dead with dignity. The Supreme Court issued a notice and went hard on the LNJP hospital, demanding an explanation as to why testing had gone down and what the hospital was doing to set aright the deplorable condition of its wards. The government also received flak for introducing a revised guideline of only testing those contacts of corona patients who were symptomatic. However, this was against the ICMR protocol of testing asymptomatic contacts of COVID-19 patients. The LG of Delhi had to step in again to ensure that ICMR guidelines were not violated. 

Amid the chaos, there were reports in May of fudging the COVID-19 data as a huge discrepancy was found between the lesser number of COVID deaths claimed by the Delhi Audit Committee (DAC) set up by the Delhi Government as against the much higher number of deaths mentioned by the three municipal corporations of Delhi. Although a petition filed by the All India Lawyers’ Union, demanding the scrapping of the DAC for furnishing inaccurate data and publishing the death dolly daily, was refused by the Delhi HC - it was enough to indicate that things were spiralling out of control in Delhi. 

Cut to the present time and it appears that Delhi can afford to breathe a sigh of relief and the credit goes to Amit Shah and the Home Ministry officials for indulging at the right time and pulling Delhi out of the clutches of a catastrophe. Otherwise, the people of Delhi were left very little to except from the Kejriwal government. 

The war against COVID-19 is nowhere close to over but the resurgent case study of Delhi gives a renewed hope.