Thiruvananthapuram: According to the assessment by the Union health ministry, Kerala's Covid defence has gone completely awry. Kerala, which was number one in the control of the virus earlier, today accounts for the largest number of Covid patients in the country.
Correspondingly, the test positivity rate is 6 times higher than the national average. The spike in the infection rate, which began with Onam celebrations, has increased 10 times at the end of the local body elections.
The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Tuesday said it has decided to depute two high-level multi-disciplinary teams to Kerala and Maharashtra, which are contributing to nearly 70% of the total coronavirus active cases in India.
Kerala health minister K K Shylaja now has the embarrassment of seeing a central team visiting the state to study what went wrong for the state to now report the country's highest number of daily cases.
Maharashtra was the only state that was ahead of Kerala, but now even that order has been reversed. Along with Kerala, a central team is also visiting Maharashtra. The central team had visited Kerala twice before, but on both occasions, the situation was not as bad as it is today.
The Union health ministry is learnt to favour more restrictions in the state, which has seen a serious let-up in implementing the Covid protocol. What probably led to the state's Covid defence going for a toss is its over-dependence on Antigen tests in preference to the RT-PCR test, which is more costly but more scientific. Experts have been warning that the Antigen test results and often incorrect and misleading, further leading to the spread of infection.
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