State’s COVID-19 defence a failure, Kerala hiding health data, alleges V D Satheesan

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The opposition on Wednesday demanded Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to break his silence as Covid is raging in the state. Pinarayi of late has not met the media and he interacts through daily Covid statements only.

Speaking to the media here, opposition leader V D Satheesan said that they have been observing the Covid situation which is not good and the chief minister has turned to be a mute spectator.

"Just look into the figures and Covid is raging. Kerala leads the country in all indicators. We demand that the present expert committee which is taking care of the Covid affairs be reconstituted as it has failed miserably. Does anyone know that the minutes of the expert committee from July this year is not being given out? Data regarding Covid is being kept under the carpet and till now about 13,000 Covid deaths have been declared as natural deaths. Everything is in a mess in Kerala," said Satheesan.

Kerala today has more than 50 per cent of the daily cases, has the maximum number of active cases besides the number of Covid deaths today are all the highest in the country, he said.

Satheesan said they have no intention to politicise this issue and all they want is that the suffering of the people should end like it has happened in other states in the country.

"For any analysis to be done, proper data has to be given and today the situation is that no data of Covid details is available in Kerala. The present strategy in testing has to change as today antigen testing constitutes 70 per cent, while in Tamil Nadu and many other states, they do only RT-PCR test, which is more accurate. I am a person who turned Covid positive twice and on one occasion, simultaneously I did both RT-PCR and antigen test. The antigen test result came as negative while the other one was positive. This is a serious lacuna in testing and that has to change," said Satheesan.

"Another fault of the government is they are not doing contact tracing. While the general rule is if one person turns positive 20 people who came into direct contact has to be tested and is being done in many states, in Kerala for every positive patient only 1.5 contacts are being tested. In most states the private sector is also actively involved in fighting Covid. Rs 817 crore have come into the government kitty through the vaccine challenge and it should be used to buy vaccines and ensure all get vaccinated".

Satheesan said Pinarayi has to break his silence and efforts should be made to see that proper analysis of the Covid health data is undertaken because then only the state can formulate proper strategies as a possible third wave is expected.

"All are baffled on what's happening as not long ago Kerala was at the top of the world and this was written by the international media. Then the general impression was only Kerala is doing testing and other states are not doing, but the truth now is while data for most states are in public domain, in Kerala it's not there," added Satheesan.