tracing contact after 10 days it is too late as soon as cases are detected we have to trace the contacts and the higher the number of contacts you trace the higher number you can put in quarantine this shows how well our public health system is doinganother set of criteria in our clinical care is to know what is the bed capacity for mildsevere cases what is the icu occupancy and then of course the death rate the death has to be calculated properly because deaths follow after two or three weeks of the occupancy you take as a numerator the number of deaths and denominators should be the number of cases you have two weeks ago not today that actually reflects your mortality ratecase fatality rate she saidepidemiological parameters to detect the prevalence of antibodies in the community are essential to know the trend like the icmr did serosurvey something you need to do periodically to see how much of the population has been exposed dr swaminathan saidshe added we need to have a dashboard of criteria which every state should have and it helps every state to monitor how they are doing this also helps to compare data across the states and the government can give more resources to those states which need more strengthening like in terms of bed shortage icubesides states can also help each other narrating an example of how it was done in europe dr swaminathan explained when there was an acute shortage of beds in france the government actually moved patients from france to germany for icu care states could also help each other outso there is a need to develop this kind of mechanism because covid19 is going to stay for a long time she saidshe added that the healthcare system should also provide other services we cannot just focus on covid19 alone because we have other health problems in the country otherwise those health problems such as tb vaccinepreventable diseases like measles institutional deliveries elective surgeries and rehabilitation may get worse than covid19 so those things have to be brought back to normal and capacity of the healthcare system has to be increased she said