Has Odisha Lost Its Way In Fight Against Corona Despite Tall Claims By Naveen Patnaik Govt?

After claiming the bragging rights in the initial days, the Naveen Patnaik government in Odisha appears to have lost its way in the fight against Corona. Till June, the government kept boasting the ‘Odisha Model’ developed to keep the Covid-19 pandemic under check had been acknowledged and praised not just in India but the world over. But as the number of fresh Coronavirus cases started going through the roof since the beginning of July, it now finds itself tongue-tied.

With the highest single-day spike of 1,264 positive Covid-19 cases, Wednesday marked a new high in the graph, taking the total number of positive cases to 21,099 and deaths toll to 108. It eclipsed the 1,078 cases recorded just the previous day, a growth of 6.37%. More worryingly, the share of local contact cases in the number of fresh cases was 417 (nearly 33%), the highest so far. The daily positivity rate too surged to 11.48%.

It took 114 days for the state to record 10,000 cases on July 7 after the first Covid-19 positive case in the state was recorded on March 15. But the figure went from 10,000 to 20,000 in just 15 days flat! It implies there has been a phenomenal rise in the number of positive cases over the last fortnight. Doctors and experts say new positive cases would continue to rise rapidly for the next few weeks.

To be fair to the Odisha government though, it was among the first states to get off the blocks and put in place measures to contain the spread of the dreaded disease: first by enforcing a statewide lockdown even before the Centre announced one, creating standalone hospitals to deal exclusively with Covid-19 cases and launching a massive awareness campaign among the people. But as the number of cases started galloping since the beginning of July, it seems to have lost its way.

One development that has caused serious concern among the people in the recent past is the spectre of community transmission. The share of ‘local contact’ cases has steadily gone up and has breached the 30% mark consistently over the last two weeks. In Ganjam district, the ‘hotspot’, as much as 98% of the total cases reported in the last one month have come from local contacts and not from quarantine centres. Experts say this is the clearest possible sign that community transmission has already set in. The government, however, has been in denial mode, consistently maintaining that nothing of the sort has happened yet.

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Speaking to Outlook, Dr. Binod Patro, senior epidemiologist at the AIIMS, Bhubaneswar said; “It would not be correct to say there has been no community transmission. It is a state where the number of contacts that can be traced outnumbers those that cannot be traced. Hence, there is no denying the fact that there has been community transmission at least in some pockets of Ganjam, if not elsewhere.”

Dr. Jayant Panda of SCB Medical College in Cuttack, who is the technical consultant to the Odisha government on COVID, however, does not agree. “Have we tested the community as yet? The answer is ‘No’. All that we have done by way of testing among the community so far is the ongoing serological tests undertaken by the ICMR in 11 cities and towns in which the percentage of positive cases has been less than 2%, well below the 20% needed to call it community transmission,” he told Outlook.

Dr. Panda makes light of the large number of cases reported over the last few days, saying; “We must not lose sight of the recovery rate, which has consistently stayed above the new positive cases.” He says the number of cases in the state would keep rising till mid-September before tapering off. “What we need is to develop herd immunity for which two-thirds of the people in a locality need to be exposed to the virus,” he added.

The rapidly rising ‘positivity rate’ (the percentage of positive cases in the number of samples tested) is another huge concern. Over the last few days, the rate has consistently stayed above 11% and is rising by a few decimal points almost on a daily basis. But the government has cleverly chosen to hide under the overall positivity rate of 4.8%, which is well below the national average of 8%. Just about the only saving grace is the fact that the mortality rate is still low at 0.54%, well below the national average of 2.4%.

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Speaking on condition of anonymity, a doctor at a leading private hospital in Bhubaneswar said one of the biggest failures of the Odisha government in the fight against Coronavirus has been its refusal to rope in experts – epidemiologists and pulmonary specialists – in formulating a strategy to fight the virus. “The people advising the government are essentially medicine specialists, who do not know enough about the ways the virus spreads to offer the right advice. Worse still, it has left all decision making to IAS/OAS officers, who know precious little about Covid-19,” he said.

With the people at large showing an increasing tendency to flout the restrictions in place after four months of lockdowns, shutdowns, night curfews and so on, things look rather bleak in the days ahead for Odisha, which began well but has now lost its way.