Get aggressive, WHO urges South, Southeast Asia

The World Health Organisation on Tuesday (March 17) called on member-states in South and Southeast Asia to urgently scale up aggressive measures to combat Covid-19 as the number of confirmed cases in the region topped 480 and eight lives have been lost.
“The situation is evolving rapidly,” said Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, the organisation’s regional director. “We need to immediately scale up all efforts to prevent the virus from infecting more people.”
Eight of the 11 WHO-affiliated countries in the “Southeast Asia region” have confirmed cases. As of Tuesday, Thailand had 177, Indonesia 134, India 125, Sri Lanka 19, Maldives 13, Bangladesh five and Nepal and Bhutan one each. 
The number is “increasing quickly”, Singh said.
“More clusters of virus transmission are being confirmed. While this is an indication of alert and effective surveillance, it also puts the spotlight on the need for more aggressive and whole-of-society efforts to prevent further spread of Covid-19. We clearly need to do more, and urgently.”
Some countries are “clearly heading towards community transmission”, Singh said, and “this should best be prevented”.
Of critical importance are continued efforts to detect, test, treat, isolate and trace contacts.
Simple public health measures are critical. Practising hand hygiene, covering your cough and sneeze, and practising social distancing cannot be emphasised enough, he said. 
“This alone has the potential to substantially reduce transmission.”
However, if community transmission does set in, countries would need to gear their responses to slow down transmission, as well as end outbreaks.
The emergency mechanism would then need to be further scaled up. A network of health facilities and hospitals for triage and patient surge would need to be activated to avoid overcrowding.
Self-initiated isolation by people with mild diseases would continue to be the most important community intervention to reduce the burden on the health system and reduce virus transmission.
Testing of all suspected cases, symptomatic contacts of probable and confirmed cases, would still be needed.
“We need to be geared to respond to the evolving situation with the aim to stop transmission at the earliest to minimise the impact of a virus that has gripped over 150 countries in a short span of time, causing substantial loss to health of people, societies, countries and economies,” Singh said. “Urgent and aggressive measures are the need of the hour. We need to act now.”