Maharashtra ‘in beginning of 2nd Covid wave,’ Centre flags concerns

A Central staff report has mentioned that Maharashtra, which is witnessing a surge within the Covid-19 instances, is on the beginning of the second wave of coronavirus. In the report, the Central staff has highlighted that there’s very restricted lively effort to trace, check, isolate instances and quarantine contacts, and there’s no adherence to COVID applicable behaviour amongst individuals in rural and concrete areas.

Based on the central staff report, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan has written a letter to the Maharashtra authorities, stating “measures such as night curfews, weekend lockdowns etc. have very limited impact on containing/suppressing the transmission” and urged the state to deal with strict containment methods, strengthening surveillance and augmenting testing.

Central staff report on Maharashtra Covid scenario | Big takeaways 

• In a letter to Maharashtra Chief Secretary Sitaram Kunte, Bhushan mentioned although the well being infrastructure is ample as of now, the “state should plan for a worse-case scenario with sufficient lead time”.
• The central staff which visited the state from March 7-11 inferred in its report that the executive mechanism ought to be re-instated to the extent witnessed in August-September 2020 to include/supress COVID transmission.
• “ln all the districts visited by the central team, the test positivity rate was high, ranging from 51 per cent in Mumbai to 30 per cent in Aurangabad, implying that there are lot many cases that are not being tested and there is high transmission in the community,” the report underlined.
• ln view of restricted contact tracing, a big pool of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals amongst contacts usually are not tracked and examined, the report mentioned and burdened that testing have to be significantly enhanced and protocol laid down by ICMR adopted.

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• “The absence of rigorous tracing, testing and containment is leading to sustained community transmission,” it mentioned. “The case-contact ratio is greater than 1:20. Though it seems excessive, a deep dive into the methodology of contact tracing revealed that the principle idea of contact tracing was not clearly understood by field-level employees, who had been primarily itemizing the quick household and neighborhood contacts, for the sake of itemizing.
• “The high-risk contacts in workplace settings, social settings and family settings were not investigated and listed,” the report highlighted.
• The report said that the present case fatality was discovered to be very excessive amongst admitted instances in Government Medical College in Aurangabad and in Vasant Rao Pawar Medical College, Nashik which must be investigated intimately, together with sending samples for complete genome sequencing, it mentioned.
• Referring to the findings of the staff, Bhushan mentioned that containment technique must be re-introduced, containment zones have to be higher outlined based mostly on contact itemizing, digital mapping of instances and contacts and ought to be a lot bigger to incorporate the world of affect of instances/ contacts.
• “The buffer zones need to be delineated. The perimeter control needs to be strictly enforced. For each containment zone, the Rapid Response Teams should develop an operational plan,” he mentioned.
• Bhushan additionally burdened on augmenting testing to convey the check positivity charge to lower than 5 per cent and strengthening surveillance by lively home to deal with seek for lively instances/contacts in containment zones (as per the containment plan).
• Further, passive surveillance for ILI and SARI have to be enhanced by well being establishments, and involvement of personal practitioners.
• “The Incident Command under the leadership of district collector and municipal commissioner should be actively re-instated with whole of government approach to contain/ suppress the transmission. This should be monitored at the highest level,” Bhushan mentioned.
• For each constructive case, not less than 20 to 30 shut contacts (together with household contacts, social contacts’ office contacts and different informal contacts) have to be promptly traced and tracked and the apply of isolating 80-85 pre cent of lively instances saved in residence isolation must be reviewed, he mentioned within the letter.
• “Vaccine hesitancy among frontline workers needs to be addressed as their services would be required if the trajectory follows the upward swing as is being witnessed now. The state should also expedite vaccinating those with co-morbidities and elderly,”  Bhushan said.

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