No advisory from Centre to establish SOPs yet
PANAJI
Just three years ago, 10 people in Goa testing positive for the Covid-19 virus, which spread chaos, wrecked businesses, and left millions of families with loss of kin across the globe, would have been news that sent the administration into panic mode to come to grips with the situation. But now the officialdom in the Directorate of Health Services is not worried.
Officials in the office of the State Epidemiologist said there is absolutely no cause for worry because the severity of the currently active variants of the virus is minimal.
Currently, even if you test positive for Covid, it is on a par with flu infections with similar types of symptoms.
“Testing and its result is the only way to know if you are Covid positive. But there is no reason to force people to test if they experience symptoms because the disease is extremely mild,” said a senior doctor at the DHS.
There are also no instructions yet from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to enforce the pandemic-time mandates or standard operating procedures (SoPs), he added.
Over the last weekend (Saturday–Monday), the Covid-19 tracker maintained by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 10 fresh Covid-19 cases, of which one person had fully recovered in Goa.
The incidence of Covid-19 cases here was in line with the trend in other states like Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, among others.
The sudden increase in cases is being attributed to the new variant called JN.1, which has emanated from the Omicron virus. The World Health Organisation (WHO) report on this latest variant notes: “Available limited evidence does not suggest that the associated disease severity is higher as compared to other circulating variants.”
