All 22 Haryana districts classified as orange zones

Only two districts – Sonepat and Faridabad – were marked as hotspots or red zones

The Haryana health department on Wednesday categorised all 22 districts of the state into orange zone in terms of Covid-19 spread. Only two districts – Sonepat and Faridabad – were marked as hotspots or red zones prior to the Wednesday’s classification done by the state government.

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Additional chief secretary (ACS), health, Rajeev Arora said six parameters along with their critical and desirable values as communicated in May 17 guidelines issued by the Union health ministry were taken into consideration to delineate the 22 districts in orange zone.

“We analysed and found that all our districts are leaning more towards the desirable values. We are not yet there as far as desirable values are concerned, but none of our districts are comprehensively leaning towards the critical values,” Arora said.

The six parameters on the basis of which fresh evaluation has been done are total number of active cases, active cases per lakh population, doubling rate (calculated over seven-day period), case fatality rate, testing ratio (number of tests per lakh population) and sample positivity rate (confirmation rate).

The benchmark for critical and desirable levels are, however, dynamic and can be revised by the Union health ministry as per the evolving situation at the field level, officials said.

‘Only containment zones are relevant now’

Top state officials said in the changed scenario post-May 17, wherein more relaxations have been given in Lockdown 4.0, the relevance of red, orange and green zones has greatly reduced.

“What actually matter now are the containment zones. The primary area is a containment zone where intensive action needs to be taken to break transmission. This area should be well defined by the district administration. Stringent action needs to be initiated within these zones in term of active search of cases, testing of all cases, contact tracing, strict enforcement of social distancing norms, identification of local community volunteers, emphasis on hand hygiene and use of masks. The containment zones have to be delineated based on mapping of cases, geographic dispersion of cases and contacts, area having well demarcated perimeter and enforceability of perimeter control,” said an official.

How these districts became orange zones

No district has more than 200 active cases – a desirable value

No district has more than 15 active cases per lakh population – a desirable value

Only Dadri, Faridabad, Kaithal, Kurukshetra, Mahendergarh, Rewari and Rohtak have doubling rate of more than 14 days – a critical value

Only Panipat and Rohtak have case fatality rate of more than 6% – a critical value

All districts have testing ratio of more than 65 tests per lakh population – a desirable leaning value

All districts have sample positivity rate (confirmation rate) of less than 2% – a desirable value