Ramaswami: The way ahead While access to up-to-date laboratory tests is an obvious need, India urgently requires short-, medium- and long-term strategies. Health management must be supported by research, which is both curiosity-based and problem-solving. Curiosity-based research is mostly done by academia in universities, while problem-solving research cannot wait for slow academic performance, but should be commissioned and funded by the health management system for quick answers. It is still well worth, nay imperative, that a task force is established with the best brains – experienced and competent. The task force members should be dedicated full-time to this one epidemic, work full-time and make daily decisions. All officers in government departments have their regular work and so a task force made up of such officers will not be efficient: if they are to serve on the task force, they should be relieved from regular work and assigned to the task force full-time. The task force, which should be established by the prime minister, must guide immediate crisis management and also design short-, medium- and long-term strategies for control of infection and community outbreaks. A crucial function of the task force would also be to disseminate authentic information on outbreaks and squash fake news. Gathering of real-time information for immediate action, and not merely summary reports on statistics, is the function of true public health surveillance. Following the 1994 putative plague outbreak in Surat, the Government of India had appointed a technical advisory committee, which recommended district-level disease surveillance in all districts in India (GoI 1995). Instead, a secondary data-collating mechanism, called Integrated Disease Surveillance Project (IDSP), was launched (John and Jitesh 2016). So today, we have no reliable or real-time counts on flu cases and mortality. The reported case fatality rate in 2017-2019 ranged between 4.2% and 7.4% (NCDC 2020). A review quoted 981 deaths among 27,236 lab-confirmed cases of flu in 2015, with a fatality rate of 3.6% (Murhekar and Mehendale 2016). A publication from Bhubaneswar, Odisha, reported a 15% case fatality rate in hospitalised patients (Dwibedi et al 2019). In other countries, the case fatality rate for flu is 0.1%; the 30- to 150-fold higher case fatality rate in India is probably partly due to the lack of intensive care facilities in many hospitals.