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Crowds throng markets as TN eases curbs before complete shutdown
The Tamil Nadu government on Sunday came under the criticism of health experts as hundreds of people thronged markets and showrooms amid a weekend relaxation on services ahead of the complete week-long lockdown from Monday
The Tamil Nadu government on Sunday came under the criticism of health experts as hundreds of people thronged markets and showrooms amid a weekend relaxation on services ahead of the complete week-long lockdown from Monday.
Barring shopping malls, all shops, delivering both essential and non-essential services, were allowed to run till 9 pm to allow the public to gather enough supplies ahead of the shutdown. However, the decision not only led to panic buying but people were seen shopping for textiles, jewellery among other items, leading to intense traffic in areas such as Chennai, Madurai and Trichy.
Shops selling groceries and vegetables will remain shut during the lockdown period. Only the horticulture department will be allowed to supply vegetables and fruits through 4,380 mobile carts.Medical stores will remain open while services such as milk supply, water and newspapers will continue to function.
On Sunday, the state recorded 35,482 cases and 422 deaths, according to the daily health bulletin.
Expressing concerns over the government’s decision to open all shops, doctors said they feared that the weekend crowding would lead to a Covid spike.
“By giving the general public a free hand to do anything today and sending a message that it will be strict from tomorrow onwards has created a sense of less fear,” Dr Deepak Subramanian, deputy medical superintendent, GEM hospital, Chennai, said.
“The crowd is not right at this stage. This is going to have an impact in the coming days. The Covid curve in Chennai was flattening but I hope this doesn’t make it worse,” he added.
Public health experts opined that the state could have extended the lockdown by continuing with the existing restrictions and shouldn’t have permitted non-essential services to function.
“It is a miscalculation. I don’t see malice, they just botched up,” Dr J Amalorpavanathan, a public health expert and former member secretary of Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu, said.
“The lockdown was beginning to show its results and they could have continued allowing essentials like buying vegetables for a few hours every day. Everybody will not have bulk cash when a government cart arrives, you don’t know at what time it will come and it can’t enter narrow slums. Opening for 24-hours and then closing for a week isn’t logical.
The government may not have anticipated what happened today. It’s frightening. I think workers inside textile and jewellery shops could act as super spreaders because they were exposed to the crowds for more than eight hours. Most of them wouldn’t have been vaccinated.”
Reacting to the criticism, P K Sekar Babu, minister for Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments, who is also in-charge of Covid-19 control in Chennai, said the weekend relaxation was to ensure people did not suffer or ran out of supplies during the shutdown.
“The chief minister gave this two-day window so that people do not suffer during the intense lockdown. If we didn’t allow this time, we would have been criticised for suddenly announcing a lockdown and we would have been questioned over what people would do for food and how they would go back to their hometowns,” he said.
The state’s on-going lockdown was imposed from May 10 to 24, which was later extended with no relaxations on the advice of medical experts who estimated Covid-19 cases to peak by the end of May.
Chief minister M K Stalin also held an all-party meeting of legislators before making the announcement on Saturday. “It is sad that people treated the lockdown like a holiday and not as an emergency caused by Covid,” Stalin at the meeting.
He added health and frontline workers cannot be burdened further and that the pandemic had to be brought under control so that educational institutions could also resume functioning.
The expert committee had recommended extending the lockdown by at least two-weeks and to make it stringent as cases and deaths continued to witness a surge in the state. They believed that the lockdown period could be used for increasing health infrastructure, testing and surveillance.
“We give strategic advice based on the disease. But how the government implements a lockdown is their administrative decision,” one of the members said on the condition of anonymity.
“There is no other choice except going for a continued lockdown as cases are surging in the districts. Though cases in Chennai aren’t rising anymore, 99% of ICUs are occupied, hospitals are unable to shift people from oxygen support to ICUs, so the decline isn’t enough,” the member added.
