Bhubaneswar: The Odisha government on Friday asked the collectors of eight districts which have been reporting more than 100 COVID-19 cases daily for a fortnight, to identify the exact cause of the spike and to roll out an area specific strategy immediately.
The direction in this regard was given by chief secretary A K Tripathy to the district collectors and district COVID Observers in a meeting through video conferencing.
"The rate and cause of the spread in disease differ from one area to the other. The nature of spread in rural area becomes different from that of the urban and city area. The border areas with neighbouring states also have their own uniqueness," Tripathy said.
As such, district collectors must rework their own district specific strategies and should keep on updating the approaches with the government on the changing situations, he said.
"The spike of cases in rural areas should be contained within a week," Tripathy told the collectors.
Development Commissioner S C Mohapatra said: "Since COVID-19 positive patients with co-morbidity are more vulnerable, each district must have a robust strategy to pick them up to the hospitals at an early stage for proper treatment".
Additional Chief Secretary Health and Family Welfare P K Mohapatra said, "An expert body with experienced medical professors is now functioning in the state for providing critical care advice to the doctors. The treating physicians in different districts should be in active contact with the expert team for containing the death rate".
Additional Chief Secretary and Special Relief Commissioner P K Jena advised the district collectors to encourage home isolation of a-symptomatic or mild symptomatic positive cases instead of burdening the Covid care centres and hospitals.
Tripathy also directed that the COVID-19 hospitals should be kept free for treating the patients requiring critical care. A robust home isolation mechanism and frequent follow up with the patients by health personnel would be more helpful for physical and mental health of the non-serious and asymptomatic cases, said the chief secretary.
The meeting also discussed the strategy adopted by the Ganjam district administration which was effective in reducing the rate of infection.
Ganjam Collector V K Kulange said intensive house to house survey, digitization of the survey data, identification of vulnerable persons with co-morbidity, a mechanism for frequent contact with positive cases on day to day basis, strict enforcement of containment zones helped the district administration in containing the rate of infection.
The Collectors of Rayagada, Sundargarh, Cuttack, Khurdha, Balasore, Mayurbhanj, Koraput, Ganjam and Municipal Commissioner of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) informed the government on the strategies they were working on to contain COVID-19.
Necessary expert advice was given to sharpen their strategies, Tripathy said and directed them to create more concern and intensity among the people in urban areas.
Meanwhile, Odisha's COVID-19 tally mounted to 72,718 with detection of 1,698 new positive cases on Friday while the death toll mounted to 390 with 10 more fatalities.
(PTI)
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