Record positives amid mass testing vow
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: May 31, 2021 -

IT'S really alarming that on the same day the nation's single day coronavirus cases dipped to a record low after over 40 days of the devastating second wave, Manipur logged 1000-plus Covid-19 cases twice within 48 hours in addition to over 32 patients succumbing to the infectious disease.

Since the onset of the second wave there has been apprehension that the virus wouldn't spare any region, especially those states which were in a fix over whether or not to resort to lockdown as such a step would inevitably affect economic activities and hit hard the poor or waited for the green signal from the Centre with the belief that New Delhi would extend assistance to lessen the lockdown-induced hardships.

That lockdown conterminous with aggressive contact tracing, isolation and treatment of the infected people is one of the best choices to tackle the pandemic could be seen from Maharashtra and Delhi; which were the first two states to clamp partial or total lockdown, limping back to normalcy despite being the hardest hit states during the initial stages of the second wave.

While Maharashtra with a cumulative total of over 5 crore still has more than 2 lakh active cases, Delhi's cumulative cases at present is over one crore but there are only around 15,000 active cases whereas Manipur with a total of 49,882 people infected till date has over 8482 active cases, more than half the caseload of the national capital.

Southern states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which went to the assembly elections amid the second wave and delayed in locking down the high risk regions, have active cases similar or greater than that of Maharashtra's.

Moreover, Delhi's earlier crisis of shortage of medical oxygen and hospitals running out of Covid beds have been effectively addressed to a significant extent owing to the combination of lockdown and extensive contact tracing and testing and it is now mulling to ease the restriction in a graded manner.

Delhi's situation is a classic example of how aggressive containment measures followed up with effective tracing and testing could tame the virus.

However, in Manipur's case, the idea of intensifying tests to trace the vectors seems to have dawned upon the government only after the state's daily cases crossed the 8000-plus figure for three consecutive days since May 25 as the test rate has improved.

Had the government-imposed restrictions and adopted the tracing, testing and treatment protocols in the right earnest when the state's daily test positivity rate till late April was less than 10 per cent, then the situation wouldn't have been as worse as it is at present.

Like it or not, the state's test positivity rate reaching 20.55 per cent on Saturday from 12.17 per cent on April 29, the day when the virus hotspot Greater Imphal was declared as containment zone, testifies lack of initiative to effectively tackle the pandemic during the weeklong containment period or the subsequent lockdown imposed in 10 high risk districts.

Now that the state's daily cases has breached the 1000-mark twice hours after the chief minister announced launch of mass testing, authorities concerned need to galvanise all possible resources to bring the situation under control and leave no room to suspect that the curfew/lockdown being imposed for over a month now is part of the covert bid to cover up government's inefficiency to tackle the challenge that is lying in front of it.