Event summary: Bright Spots in COVID-19 Management in India

With the pandemic entering its third year and COVID-19 continuing to challenge the global health system, public health experts from India gathered to share bright spots and lessons learned from the country’s response. The virtual entitled Bright Spots in COVID-19 Management in India: The Power of the People was organized by India COVID SOS, a coalition of more than 500 scientists, engineers, policymakers, and epidemiologists who are volunteering their time to research and document best practices in COVID-19 care and management across the country.

The January 19th event focused on five key areas: successful COVID-19 vaccination campaigns; relational and evidence-based COVID-19 management; operational excellence in COVID-19 management; technological and engineering innovations for COVID-19; and cross-sectoral collaboration. Echoing a theme of silver linings by several speakers, Angela Chaudhuri, from Swasti’s #COVIDActionCollab, noted that the crisis has helped generate health solutions that are having an impact in other areas. These “systems and structures that did not exist pre-COVID, [can now] use COVID as an entry point,” she said.

However, many of the experts also stressed that the most important aspect of the country's pandemic response was the “power of the people.” Ashwin Naik, a health care entrepreneur and CEO of Manah Wellness, said that the Indian response showed that people working together have the power to “effect sustainable change, scale impact, and harness the power of technology to raise capacity.” India’s ability to create broad coalitions and galvanize the public-private sector in providing solutions, he added, has been one of the bright spots in the country’s management of the disease.

"No single organization can respond effectively given the depth, width, and long-term effects” of COVID-19, noted Swasti’s Chaudhuri.

It was a sentiment shared by Ajay Nair, the CEO of Swasth, a non-profit that aims to leverage India’s clinical capabilities and technology to enable integrated care delivery models. His organization, he said, had assembled a coalition of more than 150 organizations that helped India manage its two COVID waves, first by accelerating telemedicine and home monitoring to some 260,000 patients, and then by creating open databases that tracked everything from infections to available oxygen. Swasth, he said, had become India’s largest private emergency oxygen effort and that more than 250 volunteers had delivered 60,000 oxygen devices and 50,000 pulse oximeters to communities in need.

Taslimarif Saiyed, CEO of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), also shared how his team was working to reach those most in need by building capacity in-country. Just one month after launching a COVID-focused accelerator, the center received proposals for 1,100 innovations in areas including diagnostics, respiratory devices, pre-screening, cold chain, and wastewater, among others. Of those, 30 ideas were developed and 23 are being used across 16 Indian states.

C-CAMP also launched C-CAMP InDx (Indigenisation of Diagnostics) to help foster nationwide molecular diagnosis in India. For a country without COVID-19 diagnostics at the start of the pandemic, India’s now produces one millions rapid COVID tests per day, all to international standards.

Encouraging stakeholders to work towards common short and long-term goals, leveraging academic and industrial strengths, and working in partnership with the government, have all been key to India's response, Saiyed said. “Architecting collective impact, orchestrating resources and initiatives, and acting with urgency and agility” are the best way to build resilience, he added.

India’s exercise in national collaboration, the panelists added, would be essential going froward. “It’s important to have a breadth of response, to be agile,” said Aarti Mohan, Co-founder at Sattva Consulting, adding that by staying ahead of pandemic’s path, India would be able to pivot from pandemic response to capacity building for future crises.

Dr. Nachiket Mor, Visiting Scientist at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health in Chennai and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore, who chaired the webinar, summarized what he learned from India’s COVID response: “Where we succeeded was where there was openness and trust.” Homegrown innovation, he added, can exist where there is a strengths-based perspective, by assessing what one does have to offer, versus by examining what one is lacking. He also said India should use its lessons from this crisis to improve the public health system, “so we don’t have to re-enter crisis mode next time.”

Dr. Purnima Menon, a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, who moderated the event, agreed that this was the only way to properly “think about how society comes together around the entire journey of a public health problem,” from every aspect, including prevention, diagnostics and treatment.

“What this crisis has done for India, and for the world, is force us to care, force us to trust each other, draw on each other’s strengths, and in a sense, has really forced us to reckon with the idea that our abilities to adapt, to be flexible, to trust and to care for things that are beyond any one of us, is really central to solving some of the biggest problems that lie ahead,” she said.