We have to agree that the AP government has been exceptional in conducting the COVID-19 confirmatory tests and stands still when compared to any other state in the country. Now, the question is, does it come under effective management of the COVID-19 transmission? Certainly not.
One may argue that the increase in the number of tests will expose more positive patients and the virus spread can be controlled by isolating the infected persons. The reality is, on average it takes 4-7 days to get the COVID-19 test results of your sample in AP under the present circumstances. In the meanwhile, a person can infect a lot if he hasn’t restricted himself to the home quarantine.
On the other side, there has been sheer negligence visible from the ground level staff in this critical pandemic period. During the collection of samples, a lot of errors have been reported and most recently, Prakasham District collector Pola Bhaskar vented out frustration on the medical department for ruining 27,000 test samples due to mishandling.
In many areas, the samples haven’t been handled with proper care, according to norms and disastrously, some samples aren’t even labeled on their caps that eventually produced false results. The ministers and government officials are consistently failing to monitor the entire testing process out of the overconfidence evolved from their enormous testing numbers.
On the other side, the lives of the people are also neglected and in the past few days the rate of COVID-19 infection in Andhra Pradesh is slightly higher than the Telangana and there is a significant rise in the number of deaths too. No media has reported this poor management from the government and the AP Sircar solely focussed on the testing process in which they have committed too many mistakes already.
So, many analysts say that the COVID-19 disaster management constitutes proper treatment, following all safety norms and protecting as many lives as possible along with testing. Hence it is the prime time for Jagan’s government to take a step forward in this pandemic period leaving all negligence and overconfidence.