The COVID-19 Crisis Management Centre-Operation (CCMC-Ops) Directive Committee headed by Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba directed all the district administration offices (DAOs) across the country to bring smart lockdown modality into implementation.
Three weeks ago, the government had prepared a scientific and statistics-based smart modality of lockdown that can be implemented in all concerned districts, regions, municipalities and rural municipalities based on cases of infection, active cases, mortality and physical infrastructure of the government hospitals.
“We have instructed all the DAOs, especially the Chief District Officers, who will be the coordinators of the concerned districts to take the specific decision regarding the modality of lockdown to be imposed in their region,” Joint Secretary and spokesperson for the CCMC-Ops Nurahari Khatiwada told The Rising Nepal on Monday.
“As per the circular issued to the DAOs, smart lockdown now can be imposed from August 16 evaluating the respective sector’s level of infection and other criteria set by the smart lockdown modality,” Khatiwada said.
From August 16, the concerned districts and even rural municipalities can enforce smart lockdown at any time analysing their area’s overall cases of the COVID-19 infection, clarified Khatiwada.
For effective implementation of smart lockdown, the Directive Committee headed by PM had endorsed the rules related to COVID-19 Infection Risk Control, 2021, prepared by the expert team members of the CCMC-Ops.
Analysing the health security risk factors, the government has categorised the risk zones into four levels as red, amber, yellow and green zones.
Under the four classified statuses, red status region
will have hard nature of lockdown, with mixed lockdown under the amber zone, soft lockdown in yellow and minimal lockdown under green status.
Five scientific variables will be analysed before making any decision to enlist them into any colour-specific status. They include – weekly test positivity rate, percentage change in infection compared to the previous week, weekly new cases per million, bed occupancy in percentage, and deaths per million.
Based on five different variables, the red zone listed five different variables were given 20 marks each, 13 marks under amber status, six marks under yellow status and three marks under green status.
Under the given marks for every variable, if the outcome crossed 65 out of 100, such area can enforce hard lockdown, with mixed lockdown for regions receiving 30-65 marks, soft lockdown for regions scoring 16-30 and minimal lockdown if a region receives less than 15 marks.
“The actual situation of the infection of COVID-19 in each district, region, and the area will be known if the officials of the concerned districts analyse and put the data correctly,” according to Joint Secretary Khatiwada.
Apart from CDOs in the concerned district, officials at the central office of CCMC-Ops can also provide them support to know the actual effect of the virus infection, he said.
Source : TRN,
