There is a cloud; but there is also a silver lining. There has been a 3 percentage point drop in the growth rate of coronavirus infections in West Bengal and a 20 percentage point jump in the recovery rate. Now for the cloud — the state seems to be falling behind on contact tracing and quarantining foreign arrivals, interventions that are a part of standard protocol to check public transmission. Last week, 283 people from Malaysia and Kyrgyzstan refused to spend a week at the state’s paid quarantine centre and headed home. Unsurprisingly, a blame game has ensued between the officials of departments of health and micro, small and medium enterprises as well as the Bidhannagar commissionerate. Apparently, the Centre, too, is not quite blameless. The chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, has pointed out that the Centre is not ensuring that passengers from abroad pre-book a paid-quarantine accommodation as was agreed upon. But Ms Banerjee’s administration is guilty of some lapses. There are reports that relatives — from Salt Lake, for instance — who have come in direct contact with a Covid-19 patient are not being contacted to monitor their health during self-isolation. Laxity at multiple levels could undo the progress that Bengal has been making in tackling the pandemic. Ms Banerjee should look at Kerala and take lessons from its template of diligent and comprehensive contact tracing to contain the spread of Covid-19.

Kerala has other important lessons to impart. One of the reasons for its success is the clear demarcation of responsibilities. It charged the state-level control room with tracing the primary contacts and set up field-level teams to find secondary and tertiary contacts apart from mobilizing people to report those violating home quarantine. Streamlining institutional interventions is not enough; public participation to honour institutional directives holds the key in this battle. It is true that Ms Banerjee has on several occasions urged people not to hide symptoms or history of contact. But social stigma remains a formidable stumbling block against successful contact tracing. These prejudices must be tackled firmly through awareness campaigns. The battle against Covid-19 needs to be fought unitedly by the State and its citizens.