About a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered the world’s largest lockdown on 24 March 2020, India’s leading medical research body told the government that the shutdown would have limited impact on the spread of the Coronavirus, preventing only 20-25% of infections that might eventually be detected at the peak of the pandemic. This effect would be “temporary” unless the government took other scientifically recognised measures (e.g. house-to-house screening and scaling up quarantine for those showing symptoms in affected communities, ) to curtail the pandemic, the government was informed. Never made public, the information was based on an internal assessment carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the government’s premier agency of doctors, epidemiologists and other experts, tasked with addressing the Coronavirus outbreak, which claimed 652 lives and infected 19,818 by 22 April 2020.
Nitin Sethi & Kumar Shrivastava, 'Govt Knew Lockdown Would Delay, Not Control Pandemic', Article14
