A little over two months ago, the state health education minister posted an infographic on social media comparing the COVID-19 situation in Bengaluru city and the country of New Zealand.
With the infographic, the minister intended to say that the city that has almost double the population of the country was better in dealing with COVID-19. However, things don’t look the same after two months. During the time when the minister posted the infographic, the city had about 450 coronavirus cases while New Zealand had 1,150. Two months later, the city has over 110,000 cases and is adding over 2,500 cases every day. On the other hand, the country of New Zealand has a total of 1,339 cases.
Here’s How Bengaluru Plan Was Dented
Once the city was lauded for its efforts for its response in the COVID situation and for managing to keep the infection rate low. Things changed swiftly. According to Giridhara Babu, the epidemiologist said,
“The city had three to four months to plan for a surge in cases, but the city did not plan for the future. They mostly assumed that the lockdown implementation was sufficient.”
In June, when the lockdown was opened, the city saw floods of people coming in from different places possibly carrying the virus. Some say that this led to an increase like the health commissioner Pankaj Pandey.
“We were sandwiched between these two states (Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra) which already had a very high viral load. So we were bound to get affected.”
An official from the COVID task department shed some more light on the matter. He said,
“In the initial phase, the case numbers in Bangalore were so few, that people all over the country felt Bangalore is the safest. That may also have caused people to ‘reverse-migrate’ back to Bangalore. We didn’t look at the inbound travelers as a major source of infections.”
According to Hephiba Rani Korlapati, a bureaucrat who runs the COVID war room in the city, it is the easing lockdown decision that complicated the city’s efforts. According to her,
“Aggressive testing of contacts and home isolation is the way to contain the spread. That is being taken very seriously and is being done right now.”
Source: India Today
