Dealing with active cases

Administrations must create stockpiles of resources and improve management now

On Wednesday, active cases of Covid-19 in India crossed the three million mark for the first time, adding to the burden on what is an already creaky health care infrastructure. Active cases – those Covid-19 patients still carrying the virus, and thus under treatment – is a crucial metric because it directly reflects the pressure on a region’s health care infrastructure. The metric is even more crucial in the current circumstances as resources and health personnel are over-stretched. The most worrying factor remains how fast active cases are continuing to grow. For the week ending Wednesday, India has on average added over 113,000 active infections every single day. At this rate, India is staring at four million active cases by the first week of May, and this number is likely to approach five million in the third week of May, by which time the country’s trajectory is expected to peak.

Handling such a volume can be debilitating for any country, leave alone one like India that has a shortage of resources. In terms of this, management of lifesaving resources such as hospital beds, medicines, oxygen, ventilators, even ambulances is becoming the difference between life and death for thousands of people. On Wednesday, a record 3,643 people lost their lives to the disease in India. We may never know how many of those died from the disease and how many lives were lost because hospitals, doctors and families were unable to procure life-saving resources. This level of fatalities can be prevented provided two things are done: First, administrations create stockpiles of these resources when Covid waves are waning; second, administrations can improve onground coordination for better management so that available resources are present when and where needed.

While it is too late to do the former, the performance of administrations on the latter can be improved. Some states have created so-called war rooms for managing resources at hospitals, and others have made portals that show live availability of beds and oxygen. However, many states are yet to execute such measures, and even if they have, are not executing them properly. Many “live” hospital bedtrackers, for instance, operate with an hours-long lag, which means people are going to hospitals where they think beds are available, only to find that the information was dated. More than a year into a pandemic when the number of patients seeking these resources is at an all-time high, losing lives to such mismanagement is unacceptable.