Around mid-April in 2020, when the pandemic was just unfolding amidst a strict lockdown, the State was witnessing about 30 cases a day with a testing capacity of 2,000 samples per day.
Now, a year after witnessing the peak of over 10,000 cases and about 100 deaths a day and 9.9 lakh caseload, the State is in for a much worse situation and it is evident from the rising number of infections by the day. In the second wave, the daily tally already reached close to the first wave’s peak by witnessing 10,759 cases on Thursday, thanks to the rapidly spreading virus and unrestricted activity at public places like markets, malls, theatres, places of worship, educational institutions and others which were the last ones to be opened up for the public when the lockdown was lifted in a phased manner last year.
Though the State has adopted the 'test, track and treat' strategy to face the second wave, not enough resources are being put to use as the focus was more on providing vaccination to eligible beneficiaries. Only police department has been enforcing the mask rule at public places. Some of the district administrations ignored informing the public about the containment zones in their areas. The onus is also on people who have been ignoring COVID-appropriate behaviour despite witnessing the havoc caused by the pandemic once.
Limited testing
Despite having a capacity of testing over 85,000 samples a day, the State has been testing only around 32,000 samples on an average daily since April 1.
As a result of the limited testing, the daily positivity rate increased from 4% (April 1) to 25.7% (April 22) which was the pandemic’s highest daily positivity rate.
Mobile sample collection centres were recently opened in some districts but they were provided with a limited number of test kits. Only recently, the number of samples tested was gradually increasing. For the first time in 26 days, the daily testing figure crossed 40,000 on April 22.
“We have come to Vijayawada travelling 15 kilometres for a COVID test after officials announced that mobile centres were reopened. However, at the testing centre we were told that only 150 test kits were provided while there were tens of COVID suspects in the queue,” says V. Vijay, a native of Edupugallu near the city.
As of April 22, the State has over 22,000 beds in 195 government and private hospitals and only 39% of them were occupied while 13,765 were available. The government has been roping in more government facilities and private hospitals as the cases were going up.
The State also has over 40,100 life saving Remdesivir injections and 3.38 lakh home isolation kits while there are 66,944 active cases. Unlike last year, most of the infected persons are preferring home isolation, which is another reason for the rapid spread of infection among family members.
Meanwhile, some private hospitals are trying to exploit the situation by resorting to unauthorised treatment of COVID-infected persons.
Helpline
Krishna district Collector A.Md. Imtiaz said that more hospitals are being allowed to treat COVID patients. He said currently 25 private hospitals and two government hospitals were treating patients and a round-the-clock helpline 0866-2474804 was set up to reach the public.
Though vaccination does not guarantee that one could not contract the infection after two doses, severity of sickness could be less, according to experts.
The government has been pushing people aged above 45 to get vaccinated using its vast network of ward and village secretariats and volunteers.
As of April 22, 53.28 lakh vaccine doses were administered to beneficiaries in the State and only 9.91 lakh of them got the two doses.
Active cases
Meanwhile, the spread of infection has been rapid in three districts – Chittoor, Guntur and Srikakulam – in the past two weeks as of April 22 which saw a total of over 81,000 cases in the State. Chittoor alone witnessed 15% infections (12,948) and was the biggest hotspot in the second wave followed by Guntur and Srikakulam with 10,607 and 9,438 cases respectively.
Also, 39% of the active cases were in three districts – Chittoor, Srikakulam and East Godavari.
