Maharashtra: ‘Concern tag for Nandurbar due to late data reconciliation’

PUNE: Late reconciliation of Covid data from April and May resulted in Nandurbar being bracketed among the 10 “districts of concern” in Maharashtra with a high weekly positivity rate (WPR), said Raghunath Gawade, chief executive officer (CEO) of the zilla parishad (ZP). In reality, the WPR was just 0.7%, he pointed out.
Gawade told TOI he had approached the state health department to ensure the figures were corrected.He would also be writing to the state government that Nandurbar was no more a “district of concern”.
The cabinet’s note to the health department last week put Nandurbar’s WPR at 11.7%, the highest in the state. It was 16% on Sunday, according to the state public health portal. On Tuesday, WPR for the week ending July 19 was 11.65%. The state average for the corresponding period was 3.99%.
Gawade, however, said, “Our WPR is now about 0.7%. The active patient count in the district is 41 and new daily cases vary between 1 and 5. We do not register even a single case on some days.”
Attributing the high positivity rate in the charts to the delay by authorities in updating information on the portal, Gawade said, “We have conveyed this to the state health department. We will put out a note stating that the actual positivity rate is different from the figures updated after reconciliation.”
State public health officials claimed that the high WPR of districts like Nandurbar because of late data reconciliation was impacting Maharashtra’s average. One of them said it would also have a bearing on the relaxation of Covid-induced curbs.
A senior official of the state health department said multiple sources of data besides the delayed data reconciliation had resulted in the confusion over Nandurbar’s WPR. He said two portals — CV Analytics (based on real-time data from laboratories) and that of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — give out the figures of Covid cases. Besides, each district prepares a press note daily after checking with the laboratories and deleting the duplicate names and excluding the patients hailing from out of the district.
“The three separate data hardly match. The dynamic data leads to confusion in the final data. This is being deliberated upon by the state authorities,” the official said, stressing on immediate reconciliation of data. He said laboratories not adhering to the real-time data update norms could face suspension.
Laboratory representatives said they did not have enough manpower to carry out a daily update of figures. “There are fewer laboratories than required and their staff strength is less. Data entry operators are even fewer,” said a senior official of a private laboratory from Pune.