SHILLONG, July 14: The Health department has decided to adopt a multi-pronged approach to deal with possible third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Principal Secretary in-charge of Health department, Sampath Kumar told The Shillong Times that the department will lay stress on removing the fear and stigma attached to the disease. It will also emphasise on early testing, treatment and vaccination.
As part of the strategy, Kumar said the department is planning to go all-out for a statewide campaign to mobilise people for vaccination and create awareness on the Covid-19 elimination plan in localities.
“We are vaccinating 13,000 to 14,000 people per day but we have the capacity to vaccinate 25,000 to 30,000 people. We are planning to vaccinate people to our full potential within the next few days,” he said.
He further said that the department is planning to go to the districts and blocks where there is still hesitancy.
“We are targeting to visit all the 11 districts in the next four weeks. The primary focus will be on elimination of stigma and fear. We will also focus on educating people on early testing, treatment and vaccination. We can prevent the third wave if we manage to do all these,” Kumar said.
He said East Khasi Hills and West Jaintia Hills are recording a positivity rate of more than 10%. The situation in Meghalaya, however, is far better compared to Manipur, Tripura, Sikkim, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh which are registering a surge of the cases.
“We reached a stage when we had over 1,100 cases a day. If the cases go up and down, it is a worrying sign. But in the case of Meghalaya, it is consistently going down. This shows that our containment strategy is actually stable,” Kumar said.
“Meghalaya has around 6,400 villages and 600 urban localities. Our concern is that around 10% of the villages are getting cases. Containing the virus spread at all places is an important challenge of the district authorities,” he said.
He said the effort to try and ramp up testing to isolate the virus is paying off.
“We need to ramp it up even further since there is hesitancy even in getting tested. We are carrying out a study on testing hesitancy. We have asked the DHS (Research) and IIPH Shillong to carry out a preliminary study in this regard,” Kumar said.
He said the department would train ASHAs to do the testing and the process of training will be started in a few blocks.
“We are planning to double the number of testing. If we are conducting 3,000 tests a day, we will increase it to 6,000,” Kumar said.
Talking about infrastructure and facilities in the state, Kumar claimed oxygen and bed capacities are very good. “We have asked the private hospitals to increase their bed capacity. They urged the government if it could provide funds to increase their bed and oxygen capacities,” he said.
He said bed occupancy at present is only 30% of capacity. He said the government is in touch with the foundation “Bangalore 10 ICU Initiative”.
“The foundation has agreed to set up ICU facilities in all districts. We have to provide space and manpower. The equipment will be provided by the foundation,” Kumar added.
