By ARUN PRATAP SINGH
DEHRADUN, 18 Jul: Uttarakhand is currently witnessing a fresh wave of Corona positive cases. While a week before, it did appear that things were reasonably under control in Uttarakhand as far was Corona pandemic goes, but for past few days more than a hundred cases every day are getting reported. Of course a little jump in cases being reported was expected since the testing for Corona has gone up from an average of around 1000 per day to over 2,000 per day now. But things appear to be more serious now. Today 174 fresh cases of Corona positive were reported. While on Friday it was also above 100. What is most worrisome is the fact the number of pending reports of Corona tests has risen sharply and it now stands at more than 8190. Given the fact that on an average basis, over 4 percent of those tested are reported to be Corona positive in Uttarakhand, if 4 percent of the pending reports turn out to be positive, it would add another over 300 cases.
Not only this, the recovery rate too has fallen in the state in past few days by over 6 percent. A week before, the recovery rate was over 78 percent , while now it has come down to 72 percent.
The doubling rate has also fallen to just about 25 in past seven days. Some days before, more patients were being reported to have recovered than the fresh cases reported. But today 174 fresh cases had been reported while only 60 have recovered. Hence the doubling rate in terms of number of days has fallen significantly.
There is another fact which is worrisome, the level of testing in Haridwar and US Nagar are much below the national average in terms of testing per lakh of population. Though Udham Singh Nagar has in past two days tried to increase its testing and today over 557 persons were tested in the district. Of them 45 tested positive. However around 1,000 test reports are still pending there. In Haridwar only 167 persons were tested and of them 27 turned out to be positive. Here too the number of pending reports is very high. In fact, in Haridwar over 2067 samples were pending for test which is the highest number of district wise pending reports in the report.
Given the fact that both Haridwar and US Nagar are industrial towns as well as border districts of Uttarakhand, the testing needs to be increased sharply in these two districts and the pending reports need to be declared at the earliest. According to sources in the health department, some reports in district Haridwar were pending for over a month, which is quite worrisome. The biggest challenge in Uttarakhand in view of the fresh wave of cases is to prevent community transmission. Already there are cases with no travel history or contact tracing. Clearly, the administration has a challenging task in hand.
