Covid-19 cases plateau in Telangana but decline in tests raise eyebrows

The Covid-19 case numbers handed out daily by the state's Health Department infer that Telangana is insulated from the second wave's severity.

The new positive cases have not crossed the 5000 mark in the last few days in Telangana, a time period when its neighbours - Maharashtra and Karnataka - have been reporting a near 10-fold figure. Even its Telugu twin, Andhra Pradesh, is recording over 20,000 new cases daily.

The active cases in Telangana stood at 56,917 as of Thursday, compared to Andhra Pradesh's 2.01 lakh.

The K Chandrasekhar Rao government has also claimed that Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan “has expressed satisfaction over the decrease in the coronavirus intensity in Telangana.”

However, skeptical about the Covid-19 extent as revealed from the low testing in the state, public health experts are advocating the necessity to keep monitoring the virus spread with ramped-up testing and surveillance.

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Telangana's low testing has been a concern since last year and the TRS administration was reprimanded several times by the Telangana High Court on this aspect. Though the Health Department has augmented the testing capacity to up to 1.3 lakh samples in April, it has dropped to nearly half lately.

While a record high 8,126 cases were reported on April 24, when 1.08 lakh samples were tested, the new positives were 4,693 only out of 71,221 samples examined on Thursday.

“Since Covid-19 information is in the government domain, it is difficult to verify the claims in the absence of raw data,” Dr GVS Murthy, director of Indian Institute of Public Health-Hyderabad told DH.

The theory put forward by the KCR government to explain the rush at the hospitals, high demand for oxygen, Remdesivir, medicines, and the overall variance in the reported and on-ground Covid-19 case numbers is “Hyderabad becoming a health hub.”

“People from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra who had tested positive in their respective states are coming to Hyderabad for treatment. They have outnumbered our Telangana patients, which explains the mad rush at hospitals and case numbers discrepancy,” Telangana Finance Minister Harish Rao said.

Harish was deputed by CM Rao for the virtual review with Vardhan on Wednesday, in place of Eatala Rajender, who was dropped from the Cabinet amidst the pandemic on land-grabbing charges.

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Stating that the patients' exodus has become “an unbearable burden,” Harish urged the Centre to enhance the oxygen quota from 450 to 600 MT and Remdesivir to 20,000 vials daily. Telangana also wants two lakh Covid-19 testing kits per day.

The TRS government is claiming “curtailment measures” like night curfew and oxygen bed augmentation from 9,213 to 20,738, ICU beds from 3,264 to 11,274 since the first wave as the reasons for the lower Covid-19 cases and deaths.

“An advantage Telangana had this time, is the far less number of people migrating back from states like Maharashtra, while outward migration was reported. Qualitative observations show that the pressure on hospitals has eased somewhat in the past one week in the state,” says Dr Murthy.