Community involvement in controlling COVID-19 pandemic in Maharashtra, India: Best practices and missed opportunities

Abstract

Community involvement is of utmost importance in the management of ongoing COVID-19 pandemic from compliance with lockdown, to the steps taken during easing restrictions, to community support through volunteering. Government of India used 'Test, Track, and Treat' strategy to control the outbreak, which mainly focuses on strict legislative actions and capacity building. The strategies are predominately top-down, centralized, and government owned, where community participation and involvement were grossly missing. While visiting different high burden states of Maharashtra as members of central rapid response team, the researchers observed excellent community involvement models in some resource-poor settings, which were quite successful in controlling and managing pandemic at local level, and worth replicating in other settings. In this article, some of such evidences have been highlighted. This study also emphasized how community involvement could be more effectively used as a strategy to fight pandemic.