SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2024
The Centre warned that any negligence of the kind witnessed in some tourist spots increases the risk of spread of infection. The Joint Secretary in Health Ministry pointedly said that the country is still dealing with the second wave and there is need to introspect if ‘we can afford the misplaced belief that COVID-19 is over’. Obviously, from the numbers that are released on a daily basis, we cannot ignore this and the bottom line is that we cannot ‘lower our guard and there is no place for complacency’.
Goa has had the worst experience of lowering its guard and complacency when earlier this year it saw cases of COVID-19 and deaths arising out of it spiral out of control forcing the government to hastily impose a curfew in a bid to stop the spread of infection. The main reason was the open borders policy of the government that allowed entry of tourists without any checks. It was only after the High Court of Bombay at Goa, on hearing a public interest litigation ordered checks at the borders that the government acted on this. By the time these measures were put in place, the cases had skyrocketed in the State. The numbers came down after that, but they have not yet reached a level that can be termed as comfortable.
To appreciate why the second wave of the pandemic is far from over all we need to do is take a look at how the COVID cases in Goa rose and fell in April, May and June. After a relatively low count of 3100 odd cases in March, the month of April saw a sharp increase of 33,000 plus cases and this continued in May with another 64,400 case and then there was a sharp decline in June which reported just over 11,000 cases. This is still high, but it is obvious that the virus has lost some of virulence, though it still prevails and cases in the State currently hover between 150 and 250 a day, two months since the curfew was imposed. The second wave has not yet ended.
Somehow, despite the vaccination drive, curfew, other movement restrictions and COVID-appropriate behaviour that has been imposed on the people, Goa has been unable to bring down the number of daily new cases to double digits Goa’s number of new cases is over 25 per cent of the peak in the first wave and that is a matter of concern. The test positivity rate that was at 50 per cent in May, is down to 5 per cent which is a good sign. It denotes that the pace of the slowdown has decreased and this is occurring not just in Goa, but throughout the country.
To drive home the point of how conglomerations of people lead to a spread of cases, the examples being proffered are of the crowds at the EURO 2020 championship matches being played out in Europe, where spectators were allowed in some stadia and there was then a spurt in cases in those cities. The crowd at Wembley, London for the semi-final match between England and Denmark and the resultant celebrations on the streets of England, have led to medical experts and scientists warning of a possible spurt of cases in that country in the coming days. Goa, that has already announced it would open tourism fully once the resident population has been vaccinated with at least one dose requires to take note of this as, England for instance, already has over 50 per cent of its population vaccinated and has not managed to break the contamination chain.
