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With the number of Covid-19 infections going up, the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI-Telangana) have asked the Telangana Government to ramp up testing numbers and to increase public health infrastructure in order to take care of the growing number of patients.
A study conducted by the duo, in association with the Federation of Telangana Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FTCCI), recommended that the State should build treatment infrastructure to handle between 76,000 and 2.6 lakh active cases, compared to the current level of 17,000 cases.
In the worst case scenario, if active positive cases reach 2.6 lakh, the state would need to test six lakh samples a day, for which it should be ready.
The current level of testing is around 21,000 a day. This needs to be increased as the number of cases is growing. In the conservative scenario, testing will only reach 30,000 levels which is easily doable.
The quarantine capacity too should be increased for the worst case scenario. The State should get ready with a quarantine capacity in the range of 66,000 and 2.25 lakh beds for the conservative and worst case scenarios respectively.
“The conservative scenario projections are manageable. But the state must start acting to cover the alternative (pessimistic scenario). The good news is that state is actively engaging with the disease and the death rates are very low,” T Muralidharan, Chair of FICCI (Telangana), has said, while presenting the recommendations to the State Government.
The study wanted the government to set up a centre for monitoring Covid-19 at the ASCI with representatives from industry bodies and other stakeholders.
It asked the government to limit admissions to only critical patients in both private and public hospitals.
The government should increase the capacity for Covid-19 treatment at all three levels — primary, secondary and tertiary.
The ASCI-FICCI-FTCCI study wants the state government to talk to the media heads to change the news narrative. Stating that the present narration mostly focuses on the negative side of the virus spread, it wanted the government to convince the media heads to focus on recovery stories.
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