HYGIENE can combat Covid-19

Lockdown is ESSENTIAL, Social Distancing in INDISPENSABLE, but will these measures alone cut the deal for us?

In a country like India with so many people living below the poverty line, both these measures are backbreaking. These measures are akin to urgently needed chemotherapy. But the effectiveness of these measures depends upon the discipline with which they can be implemented. And there is a limit to how disciplined the implementation can be in a vast and diverse country like India.

As we speak, hundreds of thousands of daily wage laborers, who don’t have anywhere to go now that their jobs are lost, and with that their shelter too, are crowding homeless shelters and camps across the nations in search of food and shelter. Some are even walking hundreds of kilometres on highways and roads to go back to their villages in large groups.

The authorities were un(der)prepared for anything like this and have been trying to figure out a solution. Meanwhile several NGOs and good Samaritans have been making sure that migrants are fed and taken care of. However, these crowds have potential to undo the very goal that lockdown is trying to achieve. The concept of social distancing comes last to their minds when they sit so close to each other in groups of thousands to eat in these shelters and camps.

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The photograph is not a stock picture, it was taken in Delhi on 26th March, barely 2 days after lockdown.

And those who are part of urban underprivileged communities who are at least covered for roofs are starting to struggle for food. The economically underprivileged sections across the nation are forced to make choices between their most basic daily needs vs social distancing every day, and with time they will increasingly choose the former.

If such a large population is unable to practice social distancing, aren’t we looking at a scenario where the lockdown may not be able to achieve its goals?

There is a simple method may dramatically improve the positive impact of the lockdown and other measures. And that is HYGIENE.

By now every one of us, the more privileged group of humans, is reasonably impressed by the immense power of washing hands. We have even seen Deepika Padukone demonstrating the art of washing hands on youtube and challenging other celebrities to make similar videos.

It’s not that we have reasons to doubt her, but I am sure many of us will be a whole lot more comfortable if we know that Mathematics agrees with her as well.

So, does HYGIENE play a large enough role in combating #Covid19?

THE PROOF

Here is a video made by Grant Sanderson at 3Blue1Brown simulating the spread of a pandemic and how it depends on the parameters like social distancing and R0, a measure of how contagious a disease is, using a simple model called SIR model. At about 23rd minute in the video, he asks us to make a prediction: Imagine if people need to go to a central location, like groceries store, at a certain frequency. On top of social distancing, which of these scenarios will be more effective in reducing the growth rate further:

1. We reduce the frequency of going to the store to one fifth.
2. We reduce the R0 (a measure of how contagious a disease is) to half by becoming more hygiene conscious, washing our hands more often and not touching our faces often.
   The surprising answer is that they are nearly identical.

Of course, the model used here is very simple but what it shows is remarkable. It shows that Deepika Padukone is right.

The Math agrees with her – HYGIENE can combat #Covid19!

Maintaining good hygiene can not only reduce the rate of growth of the outbreak but can also mitigate the second wave of infection, the one that may come once the lockdown and other measures are eased out.

So, what does it mean for India, our economically underprivileged countrymen, and us?

It means that public hygiene may, up to great extent, offset their limited affordability to practice social distancing.

With all the governments’ efforts of providing them with options of social distancing, they are in the direst need of options to maintain personal and community hygiene. And here lies the biggest problem – Our country perennially struggles with public hygiene. Even with all our efforts in making India clean, we are a long way from achieving it. With most of our public services now shut down or operating with limited capacities, public hygiene has taken a big hit. Public toilets, which are frequented by the urban poor, may soon run out of water let alone soaps and hand sanitizers, putting large swaths of the underprivileged population in danger of catching the coronavirus.

If we look at our reflection in the mirror that #COVID19 has shown to humanity, we will see a gaping fault in our compartmentalization of “Their Problem” vs “Our Problem”. The problem of a distant country, the problem of a neighbouring underprivileged community or the problem of a homeless migrant daily labourer is no more “Their Problem” alone.

We must succeed in containing the outbreak amongst the most vulnerable of the population. Or else we all will end up with devastating results!
For the underprivileged, these problems are not new even if their magnitude surely is. But now, more than ever before, these problems are everyone’s problems. We are all in this together.

If “They” fail, So will “WE”!

We need to make everyone’s hygiene, everyone’s priority. And we need to do it fast.

SmartLoo has built SmartLoo Corona Edition To Provide Ubiquitous Hand Hygiene

SmartLoo Corona Edition creates the much needed Physical and Digital Infrastructure for Hand Hygiene and Toilet Monitoring (to ensure that toilets are clean and used). This IoT enabled Technology Infrastructure that can plug into SmartLoo Backend and can be scaled across the city and the country.

This solution:

• Is easy To Install & Rapidly Scalable
• Provides Real-Time Operational & Issue tracking
• Provides Real-Time Inventory Tracking & Refill
• Provides Real-Time Tracking of Hand-Sanitization
• Provides Provide Hand-Sanitization Heat Maps of the City
• Provides Real-Time Tracking of Water Availability and Toilet usage in Toilets (to monitors cleanliness and open defecation)
• Provides Decision Tools & Dashboards to enable stakeholders (Govt, NGOs, CBOs ) to take required action in a targeted manner