State’s medical infra a cause for concern : Rashtra News
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A three-member Central team, which visited the State earlier in the week, has taken exception to the fact that Kerala has substantially reduced medical infrastructure and human resources to deal with COVID-19.
This could backfire if an emergency involving COVID-19 rises again, the team warned. It said that sufficient human resources be maintained so that in the event of an emergency, it should be able to call them back on short notice. At a briefing held here on Thursday, the team pointed out that the State had almost totally dispensed with active surveillance and contact tracing.
The team told top Health officials that it needed to prepare the health system in the event of a new wave arising from the Omicron variant. It might be recalled that the active case pool and new cases reported daily had substantially come down after the first wave when the arrival of Delta changed the scenario totally.
It said that in districts such as Idukki, where international tourism is thriving, there should be a separate COVID surveillance system for tourists, to ensure that they are properly tested, in the background of Omicron.
The team noted that the State has been reporting a high number of re-infections and breakthrough infections and said that vaccination alone would not help with the prevention of infections.
They said that while the mask usage seems to be high in public places, the same was not true when it came to gatherings and meetings or restaurants and warned that these could lead to superspreader events. Infections cannot be reduced unless more stress was laid on COVID-appropriate behaviour.
The team had earlier visited Idukki, Wayanad and Kozhikode. It appreciated Wayanad’s system for cluster containment and its good surveillance system among tribal hamlets. However, in districts such as Wayanad, where tourism brings in more people from outside, surveillance should be strengthened in special groups such as migrants and tourists.
The Central team also looked at the online COVID-19 death reporting system and pointed out that the site’s functionality seemed to be affected at the grassroots as those operating the system lacked training.
Also, some mandatory fields on the online portal, information about which may not be available at the level of individual hospitals, may be delaying the clearing of pending deaths.
The State health team said that separate teams have been constituted at the State and district level to verify the reported deaths and that the death authorisation committee was examining all the documents and certifying the deaths.
As part of strengthening Omicron surveillance, it has now been decided to send all samples from international travellers for whole genome sequencing, irrespective of Ct value (earlier only positive samples of Ct value less than 25 were being sent for genomic sequencing).
( News Source :Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Rashtra News staff and is published from a www.thehindu.com feed.)