Amid rise in Covid-19 cases, Centre tells State to follow 5-fold strategy

Hyderabad; In the wake of the rising COVID-19 positive cases during the last one week, the Union Health Ministry has asked the State government to examine the situation at micro level and follow the five-fold strategy of test-track- treat vaccination and adherence to COVID-19 appropriate behaviour. The Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan wrote to the State Health Secretary SAM Rizvi on Thursday. The Union health secretary wanted the State to take measures for prompt and effective management of COVID-19 duly ensuring effective compliance with various advisories issued by the Ministry. The five-fold strategy, i.e., Test-Track Treat-Vaccination and adherence to COVID-19 appropriate behaviour should be followed.

The Union Health Ministry officials said that the country had observed a significant decline in the number of COVID-19 cases during the past few months. However, since the past few weeks a rise in cases has been noted specifically in certain parts of the country with a total of 2,082 cases reported in the week ending March 8, which rose to 3,264 cases in the week ending March 15. There are few States which are reporting higher number of cases indicating possible localized spread of infection and there is a need to follow a risk assessment- based approach to prevent and contain the infection, without losing the gains made so far in the fight against the pandemic.

Telangana has reported an increase in weekly cases from 132 in the week ending March 8 to 267 in the week ending Mar 15. Further, the State reported a positivity rate of 0.31 per cent in the week ending March 15.  The State has been advised to focus on adequate and proactive testing as per guidelines, monitoring new and emerging clusters of new COVID-19 cases, monitoring of Influenza-like illness (ILI) and Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) cases in all health facilities or through dedicated fever clinics on a regular basis for detecting early warning signals of the spread of infection, genomic sequencing for prescribed samples of international passengers, collection of samples from sentinel sites (identified health facilities), and local clusters of cases.