Worrisome virus spread in rural areas
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: May 17, 2021 -

WITH records of single day cases falling or re-scripted within a day or two and death toll remaining worryingly high ever since the second wave of Covid-19 hit the state in late March and continues to spread uncontrollably, including in the hitherto safe rural areas, it seems that the containment measures which are in place have not be effective enough to tackle the pandemic.

While high rate of infections in densely populated cities or towns is but natural as humans are the only known carriers of the virus, increasing number of people in remotely located hill areas and rural pockets in the state's plains contracting the disease is indeed a cause of great concern as these places are bereft of dependable healthcare facilities.

When the Union government clamped nationwide lockdown to curb the contagion during the first wave, agricultural and other economic activities in the rural areas were allowed to continue.

Such exemption from the restrictive measures indicated that the sparsely populated villages and hill areas were relatively free from the disease.

However, in the second wave teams of state and central forces carrying out extensive awareness campaigns in far flung villages and instances of caning curfew violators testify that the pandemic remains a threat to all and nobody should ignore possibility of the virus striking anytime, anywhere.

Moreover, failure to prevent further spread of the disease in the rural areas would lead to serious deterioration of the situation for village folks neither have access to viable healthcare facilities nor separate basic amenities like toilet and room, which are of utmost necessities in view of the policy makers batting for the home isolation strategy as well as hospitals running out of beds and medical oxygen.

Seriousness of the second wave and its impact in rural areas could be gauged from Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressing on localised containment strategies in states where Test Positive Rate in districts is high and instructing authorities concerned to launch 'door to door testing and surveillance in rural India' to contain the spread of Covid-19.

The Prime Minister's directive is based on feedbacks received during a high-level meeting on Saturday to discuss the Covid-19 situation and progress of the vaccination exercise amid notable improvement in the virus situation in the national context contrary to underdeveloped regions like the northeast which is currently facing the brunt of the second wave.

Though the localised containment strategies, as advocated by the PM is technically under implementation in the state as the government curfew is in force in most of the districts along with lockdowns imposed by community or district-based civil organisations, the daily cases continuing to spike necessitates acceleration of contact tracing and testing in areas with high positivity rate.

Among other directives, the rural folks would be eagerly looking forward to PM Modi's insistence to ramp up the use of both RT PCR and Rapid Antigen Tests, transparency in reporting the real number of infected people, augmentation of health care resources in rural areas, empowerment of ASHA and Anganwadi workers with all necessary tools, guidelines to be made available in easy language along with illustrations for home isolation and treatment in rural areas, effective distribution plan for ensuring oxygen supply, including provision of oxygen concentrators, in rural areas.

If all these directives of the Prime Minister are implemented in the right earnest, then there is strong possibility of winning the battle against the pandemic sooner rather than later.