How do people get tested for covid in western countries? Do they visit the hospital and get tested on their own volition or is it some sort of mass community testing?
My reason for postponing the IPL is simply that it's perhaps not the most appropriate to conduct a cricket festival of sorts when the entire country is grappling with a serious pandemic.
This is a brilliant post, you have got to the heart of the matter. Here in Australia we consider the UK and USA to be Failed States in terms of Coronavirus, but we also struggle to see why India failed to implement the same precautions as Vietnam.
Forget the expensive stuff that we do in Australia and New Zealand - genomic testing of every single positive case so that we know who infected whom.
There are cheap things which we did which poor countries like Vietnam did too, and which should be mandatory before you play sport at home:
1.Every single person with a headache, sore throat, cough or runny nose HAS to get tested.
2. They are not allowed to take public transport to the testing site, or be driven, or to share their vehicle. Anyone who has shared a vehicle with them joins them in quarantine for 14 days.
3. Testing sites are in every suburb of every town and city.
4. While you await your result, you are not allowed contact with any other person. You may have to be locked in a room in your home.
5. If you test positive, you are hospitalised even if you have no symptoms. And your contacts (home, work etc) are forcibly isolated from other humans for 14 days.
6. Any positive case has contact tracing of everywhere they have been for 14 days, and every person they have had contact with for 14 days. And those people are banned from contact with other people for 14 days, or until they have had 2 negative tests 10 days apart.
No cleaners.
No drivers.
No cooks.
No contact with ANYONE.
Because of this, Australia has had 1 Covid death in the last 6 months - and that was someone who caught it in the Philippines.
That is how you make a country safe for sport.
India has failed to take the care of its population that Vietnam has. Vietnam has a population of 96 million, and is poor, yet has had only 2833 cases and 35 deaths. Because they forcibly isolate contacts of suspected cases at army bases.
It baffles me why India ploughs on with hosting the IPL, because it is giving India a reputation across the cricket world of being a country with brutal indifference towards the suffering of its own people. Every day that the IPL continues, the reputation of India as a nation and the IPL as a brand gets more and more damaged.
