I will not mark any district as green zone: Chhattisgarh Health minister

As the novel coronavirus continues to ravage India, the Centre has announced the conditional relaxation of the lockdown after April 20 in some areas of the country. The ministry of health and family welfare followed it with a four-way classification of districts by cases.

Chhattisgarh topped the chart with 81 per cent of the green zone, followed by Jharkhand (79), and Bihar (71). However, the Chhattisgarh state health minister Tribhuvaneshwar Saran (TS) Singh Deo maintains that the green zones will be treated as ‘yellow zones’ in order to not run the risk of the re-emergence of the virus.

In an interview with Businessline , the health minister spoke about the curtailment of coronavirus in the state, rapid response teams, and the approach to move back to normalcy. Excerpts

A lot of luck and hard work of the state authorities and the government where they were able to pro actively first set up a team on January 21 itself. Under the chairmanship of the collectors of the district, rapid response teams were put in place. And that is the way we were able to streamline coordination between various departments and ensure when the time came, that home quarantines could be put into identifying each person coming from outside the village or the town. By January 28th the screening began at airports too.

We went into locating every individual who came by flight by March 1. We were able to get across to as many people as possible, who had traveled and kept checking on them… We have been lucky and been unlucky with this as the cases emerged from Katghora (Katghora, which is located around 200 kilometers away from the state capital Raipur and has emerged as Chhattisgarh’s COVID-19 hotspot, as 27 cases have been reported from the town as on April 17.

We have 28 districts in the state and the collectors were put in charge of the rapid response team that constitutes health, police, and revenue department.

The departments coordinate within themselves and identified various centers where we could place people infected with the coronavirus once they started coming in. So it was a big exercise!

These identified centers were exclusive COVID-19 treatment centers known as the ECTC. So, from that day we had been able to now earmark 5666 beds in various phases of the spread. For stage one, we have 1750 beds. For phase two, we had another 400. For phase three, we had another 816. This adds up to 2966.

The isolation centers for the second and third phase we have identified 2700 beds. I am planning to scale this up to at least 7000-8000 in all. We have been identifying private sector units, including some colleges.

How many quarantine centers are there in Chhattisgarh?

In Chhattisgarh, we have 98 quarantine centers and 34 isolation centers.

We have treatment centers for 1750 beds; isolation centers are 34. The number of people currently in those centers is 62,000. The number went up to 95,000. But people left after finishing the 14 day period, while new people also came in.

Yes. We have started closing down schools, public places, malls, cinema halls, restaurants, etc. All this had started quite some time back. Eventually, the complete lockdown was imposed on March 21 in Chhattisgarh. However, there are manufacturing plants, including the Bhilai Steel Plant that continue to work, as it has residential facilities within its campus. Even MNGREGA, Kirana stores, self-help groups are functioning. It is not a clampdown of zero activity, but fairly curtailed activities.

There were five districts which had coronavirus positive patients. So, they would be the orange ones. I would not like to have green ones identified. I would rather term them as yellow. Personally, I would not like to mark any as green because if we have the feedback from experts -- at least 10 to 30 per cent of the population will be affected by the coronavirus. So, I am presuming 10 per cent people would be afflicted by the virus in Chhattisgarh. 80 per cent of whom would be asymptomatic. So, being asymptomatic, they would be innocent carriers because they would not show any symptoms. They would not make it to the hospital either... The morbidity rate would be high in 80 per cent of the asymptomatic cases. That is our worry because of which I would not like to mark any area as green for now.

The virus is going to be with us for the longest time. At least another six months and then another flare-up probably in December, and that probably goes up to another 18 months, according to the projection by some experts.

This information must be taken into consideration and all activities must be done accordingly. We can't have a complete curfew for one and a half years. There have to be activities and those have to be very regulated. That is why people are saying that our lifestyles probably will be changed forever.

We are looking into exit plans. Every activity should be knowledge of the possibility that the virus is amongst us and we have to contain it as much as possible by physical distancing, wearing masks, and literacy. These activities should be habituated.

We do have migrants in Chhattisgarh. However, there have been almost no complaints about their rations or a place to stay. So, that has been fairly good. Their complaint would be wanting to go back home. Otherwise, I don't think there has been any complaint of neglect by the government. And we have people outside in other states. They are facing similar distress of wanting to come back home.

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