Coronavirus: People in Telangana left to their fate

Situation arising out of the spread of coronavirus in the State is becoming worse day by day as the government is negligent and non-serious in handling it. The entire State has become a virtual minefield of corona patients and people are feared about their lives.

Though the number of patients dying due to the virus and those facing critical situation is low, the people are much afraid of their lives due to lack of affordable treatment in private hospitals.

Absence of proper health services and looting of corona patients by the private hospitals have left the people in panic. Most of the people are keeping themselves indoors and praising the gods to protect them from the pandemic. The schools are shut, and the entire academic sector is in doldrums.

Tourism, public transport and hospitality segments are facing acute fund crunch. Lakhs of private teachers are facing severe financial hardships due to closure of schools. The government is unable to decide when to open the schools and colleges and the academic year is delayed by about one month. People are not ready to send their children to schools fearing their safety. The private schools are looting the parents in the name of online education.

The poor students who do not have smart phones, tablets and personal computers are lagging behind the children of the rich and the middle classes. At the same time, the children of upper classes are unable to follow the lessons taught through the online classes.

Several psychologists are advising against online classes as they would impede the natural learning process. The administration is complacent and insensitive to the problems of the people. They have been getting their act together with great difficulty after the admonishments of the courts.

Several months have gone by since the outbreak of the virus in the State and still the government do not have a proper strategy to face the situation. Though the Chief Minister had announced in Assembly in March, this year, that government would spend Rs 1,000 crore to face the situation arising out of coronavirus, there is no proper system in place to handle the pandemic.

It seems that the Chief Minister still has been following the same approach which he stated in Assembly on March 6. Responding to the questions in the Assembly, he said there was nothing to worry about and the disease and it could be controlled easily.

Even though the situation has gone out of control, still he is behaving in the same non-serious manner. With the criticism of people and political parties, he has changed the Principal Secretary of Health which did not have any impact on the preparedness of the State in fighting the coronavirus.

Right from the beginning of the spread of the virus in the State, the Chief Minister has adopted the denial mode and is trying to cover up the bad situation in the State. As the Chief Minister did not take the situation seriously, the administration has also taken it easy and it has aggravated the situation.

All over the world, the governments of nations have adopted the approach of trace, treat and track, the 3 T approach, to handle the situation. The strategy is to find the infected, treat them and track the infected from the primary contacts. This has proved to be the right strategy and most of the countries have come out of the clutches of the virus.

Number of tests per million shows the efficiency of the governments in fighting with the coronavirus and their sincerity in handling the situation. If the per million tests are any indication, the efficiency and sincerity of Telangana government is much low.

The number of tests on each day is much low than Andhra Pradesh and positivity rate is also low, giving a false picture of the State. The average positive cases rate in Andhra Pradesh is 7,000 in the past one month's time and it is about 2000 in Telangana.

In Telangana, total number of tests carried out so far is 7 lakhs and at the same in Andhra Pradesh, it is 29 lakhs and it means that four times more tests have been done in that State.

The positivity rate in Telangana is 12 per cent and if four times more tests are conducted the number of positive cases would have reached to 3.50 lakh by now. So, this shows how the State government has covered up the situation.

As the number of positive cases has been rising at a rapid pace, people of Hyderabad have gone to villages and the disease spread all over the State which were free from it till the end of June.

Rise in the number of Covid-19 cases have caused a pathetic situation in the rural areas as at some places the patients were driven out of the villages and no one was coming forward to cremate the dead. There are no health facilities in the rural areas to treat the critically ill patients.

But the situation is not great in Hyderabad as private hospitals have been charging abnormally. A patient in critical condition is facing severe financial hardships as they have been forced to cough up lakhs of rupees for treatment.

Some patients have been forced to sell out their assets to meet the expenses of hospitals. People are afraid to go to government hospitals as gory stories about the treatment there have made rounds in the social media.

Under these circumstances, there is a need to put more focus on the treatment and improving the medical facilities. The government should immediately add treatment to Covid-19 in the Arogya Sri scheme so that treatment could be taken in private hospitals with less financial burden.

The government may pay the premium to the insurance provider for limited months than paying it for the entire year as the requirement for the treatment may come down in the next six months.

As the vaccine might be made available by end of this year, the next four months would be critical in providing the assistance to the people. The coronavirus spread may reach the peak in September and more numbers of patients would emerge in the next four months.

The State government is not serious at all on establishing a plasma bank which would help the patients.

Private organisations, including the one I have established, Telangana Plasma Donors Association, are striving hard to establish data banks of plasma donors. In Andhra Pradesh, the government has been giving Rs 5,000 to each plasma donor to encourage them to donate plasma. Similar steps could be taken to encourage plasma donation in the State for the benefit of critically ill patients.

The State government should also strive to encourage the people for undergoing tests so that they could be identified and treated. This would improve the availability of plasma donors. Unfortunately, stigma is attached to corona patients and this has become a big hurdle in taking care of infected persons.

The government should take steps do drive away the stigma from the minds of people so that testing and treating and tracing could be made easy. The number of tests should be raised substantially so that infected could be identified and isolated and it must conduct at least 20,000 tests per day to bring the situation under control. It must reach the 50,000 tests per million mark which would provide a better picture of the situation at the ground level.

While the entire State is in the grip of panic, the State government is trying to divert the attention from the handling of the Covid-19 situation. The Chief Minister and Ministers are quite busy with inaugurations and laying foundation stones than monitoring the Covid-19 situation.

The Chief Minister did not conduct a review on the situation in the past two weeks. The responsibility of handling the corona has been entrusted to the Health officials and the government washed off its hands.

(The writer is president of Telangana Plasma Donors' Association and Treasurer of Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee. Views expressed are personal)