E-Paper
Central team to check rising Covid cases in Maharashtra
The four experts had been deployed to guide the state health machinery to specifically look into testing, contact tracing, including surveillance, containment operations, Covid appropriate behaviour, availability of hospital beds.
On Monday, the central government deployed a multidisciplinary team of experts to keep a check on the state’s rising cases, especially the districts which continue to report a higher positivity rate. While central teams were sent earlier when the state saw its peak of the first and second Covid-19 waves, this is the first time the team is coming when the second wave is receding but districts like Kolhapur, Ratnagiri, Sangli and Satara where the RT-PCR positivity rate is still higher than 10%.
The central government in its letter to the state has stated that four experts, Kunal Kumar, Nodal Covid officer for the state of Maharashtra and joint secretary, ministry of housing and urban affairs; Dr Ajit Shewale, deputy director, National Center for Disease Control, Delhi; Dr Pranil Kamble, deputy director, Regional Office of Health and Family Welfare, Pune and Dr Satyajeet Sahoo, assistant professor department of pulmonary medicine, AIIMS (Nagpur).
The four experts had been deployed to guide the state health machinery to specifically look into testing, contact tracing, including surveillance, containment operations, Covid appropriate behaviour, availability of hospital beds, sufficient logistics, including ambulance, hospital-wise case fatality rate and Covid vaccination progress. The team will assess the situation, suggest remedial actions, and report everything to the Centre and state every day starting from Tuesday.
Dr Pradeep Awate, state surveillance officer, confirmed about the team’s deployment and said, “This is not the first time the central team has been deployed. However, this time the special focus is on the district with higher positivity rate especially Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara and Ratnagiri which have a higher positivity rate than the state average. The primary aim is to control the spread of the infection in these districts.”
As per the weekly positivity RT-PCR report, while the state positivity rate is at 5.4% between July 5 and July 12, Kolhapur reported 10.5%, Ratnagiri (11.6%), Sangli (11.1%), Satara (11.4%) and Sindhudurg at 9.7%.
