Odisha's Nuapada district keeps vigil on fresh Covid surge in Chhattisgarh

BHUBANESWAR: The Nuapada district administration has kept a vigilant eye on neighbouring Chhattisgarh as the latter has started witnessing a marginal rise in cases after a brief lull in the second wave.
But now, Nuapada is the district having lowest 31 active cases. There are days now when it is seen reporting no Covid positive cases at all despite testing more than 1,000 samples daily.
In the initial days of second wave, the district had become state's headache till almost the last week of May as it had been reporting very high number of infections.Nuapada, tribal district, has so far accumulated 22,697 Covid cases.
District collector (Nuapada) Swadha Dev Singh said the bigger challenge now is to expedite the vaccination and put a watchful eye on the inter-state movement as the border check post has been removed after government’s decision.
“We have very free and comfortable movement across the district with markets opened and economic activities limping back to normalcy. Even after more than 1,000 tests (out of which 250 RT-PCR), we have one, two or nil cases a day now. Our vaccination has been low till now. But in the coming week, it will gain pace as we have good stock of vaccine. With Raipur seeing a surge, we will have to see there is no further transmission,” said Singh.
On May 17, its active cases were more than 2,000 and it had been reporting more than hundred cases daily till May 22. But, its daily Covid count steadily started falling thereafter. It had reached single day peak of 700 cases in the first week of May.
Though is a smaller district compared to its neighbour Balangir and Kalahandi, its disadvantage is it is close Chhattisgarh capital Raipur, where cases were exploding in March and April. It had direct bearing on Nuapada. The district has accumulated more than 15, 000 cases in the second wave. The district’s Covid fatality has touched 72.