Covid red zones in TS removed
New cases mild, can be cured at home: Govt
Telangana state, as well as the rest of India, have a long way to go before they can declare themselves Covid-19 free. However, Telangana can now declare itself a state without any Covid-19 containment zones.
Though the state has been registering between 200 and 400 cases a day over the past week or so, health authorities have done away with the containment zone system in the state. This, it is understood, follows an analysis that with most of the new cases being found over the past few weeks being either asymptomatic or very mild that can be managed with self-isolation at home, there was no further need of the Covid-19 containment zone system.
A senior health department official confirmed on Sunday that the state has removed all containment zones. From a few hundred such zones, that sometimes included entire neighbourhoods when the spread of the disease was at its peak in mid-2020, Telangana has now become a state where the authorities feel they have a much better understanding of how the disease is spreading and the measures needed to control it.
It may be recalled that in the early days of the pandemic, strict enforcement of containment was put in place with police pickets at the entry and exit points in the city and elsewhere in the state. The authorities also used to tie banners declaring the area as a Covid-19 containment zone.
The last day that the existence of containment zones was mentioned in the daily Covid19 bulletins issued in the ‘High Court Format’ — a reference to the daily data that the High Court had insisted the health department release — was for January 6. After January 7, the section with information of containment zones was dropped.
“We are now seeing more mild to moderate cases. Initially, in addition to more numbers of severe cases, there was also panic and fear in the public and containment zones were required under those circumstances,” explained a senior infectious diseases specialist.
“Now, we have a much better understanding of the behaviour of the disease in patients, treatment protocols are wellunderstood and in most cases, self-isolation is all that is required for a specified period after which the person can get back to normal life,” the specialist said.