Express Interview: ‘With Omicron variant, it is critical for India to step up vaccination’ (The Indian Express)

Indian Express published an interview with senior research fellow Purnima Menon and Madhukar Pai who are both volunteers with India Covid SOS discuss the Omicron variant, vaccination in India and focus areas in Covid management. Menon and Pai stated that the India Covid SOS team was hearing stories of innovation and resilience. These stories needed to be preserved to hold and to learn from; this in turn inspired the COVID SOS team to reach out to Exemplars in Global Health to ask for support in curating some of these case studies, now publicly available. These positive case studies might come in handy if India were to see another Covid wave. There are many connected lessons – these include the value of leadership committed to achieving a goal (in this case reaching everyone with the vaccine); paying attention to implementation detail – the missing middle, as it were; paying attention to client communities their beliefs and constraints; communicating effectively; and more. Our challenge, as we look ahead to potential future waves, is to see whether the barriers can be broken down well before we get to the sense of urgency or desperation.