‘Infections will go up till mid-Sept, priority is to keep fatalities down’
The coronavirus infection spread from Haryana’s national capital region to the northern districts is likely to hit a peak by mid-September. There could be, however, a decline in the number of infections by September-end, additional chief secretary, health, Rajeev Arora told HT on Thursday. Excerpts:
How do you see the virus trajectory shaping?
Wherever there is an outbreak, the peak period having high number of cases accompanied by fatalities is for a month or so. Subsequently, there is a tendency to stabilise and then cases start declining. A lot also depends to what extent people adhere to safety protocols.
Case fatality rate has been rather low in Haryana. Is it plain luck?
Testing more and isolating infected patients early has an impact on fatality ratio. Also, the strategy of strict surveillance and screening has paid us. During procurement season, we even tested drivers of harvesting combines, traders and commission agents.
The virus has started shifting to north and northwest. Majority of districts have over critical values of over 200 active cases or more than 15 cases per lakh population. What’s your strategy to counter fresh spread?
There is so much movement of people. Our NCR district spike was connected with Captial cases. Once infection rate in Delhi stabilised, a similar trend was noticed in Gurgaon and Faridabad. Now the virus has moved northwards. We are hopeful that after mid-September, cases in the north will also get stabilised. Till September 15, we need to doubly ensure that fatalities are kept down.
Why is the sample positivity rate increasing?
Haryana’s daily testing has increased substantially. The average per day testing in March was just 30. It was 880 in April, about 3,000 in May, about 5,000 in June, 11,300 in July, 17,500 in August and about 23,000 in September. On an average, the positivity rate has been about 5.65%.
It meant that for every 100 cases tested, we get 5.6 positive cases. So, if you increase your per day testing by 6,000 between July and September, the per day increase of positive cases will come out to be 375-400.
How has been the experience with rapid antigen testing (RAT)?
RAT has been extremely useful in areas with a sudden spurt of cases including containment zones. It has helped us to immediately isolate infected persons in emerging hotspots. Antigen detection has also played a vital role in unlocking industrial clusters.
How would you explain the 3.7% positivity rate for rapid antigen test as compared to 6.4% for RT-PCR which is the gold standard test?
The success rate for rapid antigen test is 75-80 %. But even with a lower positivity rate of 3.7%, it is effective in isolating cases very quickly. However, we are very careful in ensuring that testing ratio for RT-PCR and RAT is 60:40. RT-PCR remains our first preference.
Are we anywhere close to bending the curve?
By September-end, the number of infections should see a decline in Haryana.