ROURKELA: As Sundargarh witnessed yet another record spike of 1,137 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, health experts suggested that the State government should re-strategise its Covid treatment protocols to arrest spread of the disease in the district. Around 632 of these cases are from Rourkela.
An official of the Health department here said after experiencing an aggressive pattern of infection in the second wave, government should rethink about its assumption of self-regulation by patients in home isolation. Addition of a whopping 15,391 new cases in a short span from April 9 to May 5 is a pointer to the fact that the government needs to revise its strategy of home isolation and quarantine all positive cases immediately to arrest the upward curve.
The present strategy is to allow 90 per cent positive cases in home isolation and hospitalise those with dipping oxygen or fall in other health indicators. Sources said, amid the deteriorating Covid situation, the Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) are also not able to monitor large number of patients in home isolation.
“The lockdown period should be utilised to trace all positive cases and institutionally quarantine them to help curb local spread as it was done during the first wave”, he suggested.
The silver lining is that the district administration had doubled its testing capacity. Around 4,197 samples were tested - 1,798 RT-PCR tests and the remaining rapid antigen tests - in the same period to record test positivity rate of 27 per cent. The district now has 6,721 active cases and a majority of beds in the Covid hospitals here are occupied.
Rourkela Municipal Corporation (RMC) Commissioner Dibyajyoti Parida said the RMC has made provision for about 2,000 beds in multiple Covid-19 Care Centres (CCCs) of which above 1,000 beds are made functional, but occupancy has been low. He said about 20 RRTs are monitoring health condition of patients in home isolation.