[WEBCAST] Reopening a Post-Pandemic India
VIEW EVENT DETAILSMonday, 8th June, 12.30 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.
LIVE WEBCAST
Watch Live on Facebook
Nearly two months into the world’s strictest Covid19 lockdown, the Indian government introduced a new set of guidelines under ‘Unlock 1.0’ to reopen its economy in a phased manner. Under these measures, everyday activities would resume in varying degrees across states, with state governments employing local strategies to prevent transmission. According to the WHO, countries considering the lifting of lockdowns should ideally fulfil the following criteria – controlled transmission, additional health capacity for tracing, testing, isolating and treating patients, minimized outbreaks in cluster zones, sufficient risk management, adherence of preventative measures among students and workers, and large scale community adjustment to the new norms. So is India really ready?
The preparedness of the public health system has been the biggest lesson from this pandemic. States with strong public health systems like Kerala have shown how to successfully contain the Covid-19 situation. Extremely resource-intensive measures such as community-based interventions, aggressive testing and strict quarantine measures have been employed to contain the spread of the virus. India can utilize data and intelligence generated during this period to fortify the public health system and make it more inclusive, reliable and equitable. This pandemic can be used as an opportunity to recalibrate health policies, investments and research to devise a robust recovery for India.
As India eases its countrywide lockdown, what will be the best way forward for India? How should the public health plans and investments be designed in the near to medium term? How can the current state of affairs propel bigger reforms in areas of livelihoods, infrastructure and sanitation?
Join us as we discuss these important questions with Dr. Shitij Kapur, Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and Assistant Vice-Chancellor of Health, University of Melbourne, Dr. Shahid Jameel, Virologist and CEO of DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, Ashok Alexander, Founder-Director of the Antara Foundation and Divya Rajagopal, Senior Assistant Editor, Economic Times as moderator.
This event will be live-streamed on Facebook. Viewers can submit questions through comments during the live stream.
Ashok Alexander is the Founder-Director of the Antara Foundation and former India Country Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His career has spanned the worlds of business and public health delivery. He has demonstrated how business principles can be applied to scale up the delivery of complex public health solutions in HIV prevention and maternal and child health, across India. He left McKinsey and Company in 2003 to establish an HIV prevention program – Avahan, for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that aimed to help stop the growth of HIV in India. In 2014, Ashok set up the Antara Foundation to see if the methods of scaling from business used there (integrating supply and demand-side measures, community-driven) could be applied to maternal and child health.
Dr. Shahid Jameel studied Chemistry at the Aligarh Muslim University and Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, India and obtained a PhD in Biochemistry at Washington State University, USA. His postdoctoral work was in Molecular Virology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, USA. In 1988 Dr. Jameel set up the Virology Group at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi, India and led it for 25 years, where his research focused on human viruses. In 2013 he was appointed as CEO of the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, a biomedical research charity based in India.
Professor Shitij Kapur is the Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and Assistant Vice-Chancellor of Health at the University of Melbourne. His background is as a clinician-scientist with expertise in psychiatry, neuroscience and brain imaging. Before moving to Australia, he was Executive Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Europe's largest and leading centre for mental health research, and prior to that, Vice-President (Research) for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Toronto. He currently serves as a director on the boards of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, St Vincent’s Research Institute, Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discoveries and the Florey Board.
Divya Rajagopal is a Senior Assistant Editor with The Economic Times (ET) newspaper based out of Mumbai, India. ET is one of the largest read financial dailies in India. Divya covers the health and pharma beat for the organisation and is now reporting on Covid-19 developments from the country. A journalist with 12 years of experience across print and broadcast, her area of interests are drug discovery, public health and access issues to healthcare.