Rural populations highly vulnerable to Coronavirus infections: Chandrababu Naidu

Amaravati: Lack of proper awareness on prevention of the COVID-19 in the rural areas is one of the major problems at present, observed the TDP President N Chandrababu Naidu, on Tuesday while interacting with the frontline warriors and virus survivors in Andhra Pradesh over a virtual interaction.

Naidu said there were many vulnerabilities in villages because of the unpreparedness of the rural people in respect of safety aspects and also due to lack of immediate access to better medical care.

Naidu said that on behalf of the Global Forum for Sustainable Transformation (GFST), they have been compiling a comprehensive list of challenges and solutions suggested by the field level experts every week. All these suggestions were being sent to the Prime Minister's Office every Sunday. Success stories were available from Vietnam where they had effectively controlled the epidemic. Korea and Taiwan also achieved success. European countries have stabilised to a lot of extent. Only with greater testing and increased immunity among the people, the invisible enemy could be defeated.

The TDP chief expressed concern over the reduced testing from 62,938 cases on August 7 to 44,500 at present in Andhra Pradesh. The testing must be expedited immediately if the Government was committed to preventing the virus spread. As of now, AP cases reached 2.96 lakh with a 52 per cent increase in cases reported in the last 17 days. In overall cases, AP has got higher infections at 597 per 1 lakh population as against 597 of Maharashtra and 506 of Tamil Nadu. The AP cases rose by 11 times between June and July while this increase was 58 times from May to July.