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DUVM meets CM seeking weekend lockdown, experts & others term it unscientific

Some businessmen from Doon Udyog Vyapar Mandal (DUVM) met Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat and Dehradun district magistrate Ashish Kumar Srivastava to seek imposition of strict weekend lockdown for few weeks in order to contain Covid-19 contagion in the city. 

However, people like small shopkeepers, vendors and daily wagers are not in full support of this idea as according to them, their livelihood depends on their day to day sales and since their business is already doing badly in the current pandemic, they cannot afford any day without any earnings. Even some doctors are not in favour of such a lockdown which they consider as unscientific.

“I have been selling six to seven pairs of footwear on the roadside on a daily basis since June but sometimes there are no sales. I earn about Rs 300 to Rs 400 on a good day which hardly pays for ration and other expenses of my children and parents. People like me hardly make it through a closed Sunday without any earnings, so if anyone wants to impose a lockdown on Saturday too, they should think about the small vendors like us as well,” said Dhani Phukela, a street vendor near Paltan Bazaar.

Meanwhile, experts have opined that lockdown on weekends will not decrease the chances of Covid-19 contagion but it will surely give a false assurance to people when they need to be more alert. According to doctor Nitin Pandey, imposing a strict lockdown on weekends is not going to save anybody from the contagion. Proper protective measures are more important for safety from Covid. He said that imposing lockdown on weekends is completely impractical and unscientific. Even epidemiologists have stated that a lockdown of less than 14 days is ineffective, therefore such a lockdown will not help in minimising the number of Covid-19 positive cases but it will severely affect the livelihood of several people in the city. Further frequent sanitisation is not good for human health, added Dr Pandey.

In the meantime, the businessmen stated that closed weekends will give administration an opportunity to completely sanitise the city, though the officials of the municipal corporation has stated earlier that as per World Health Organisation (WHO), sanitisation in the open areas is not quite effective and it can possibly cause some health issues too. However the representatives of the DUVM state that they want the State government to take any decisions like imposition of lockdown in a few days to lessen the risk because they do not want the administration to announce lockdown during the festival season which is highly profitable time for their business. Besides, they stated that Rawat and Srivastava have promised them to consider their proposal to impose weekend lockdown in the next few weeks.

Thursday, 17 September 2020 | PNS | Dehradun

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