How the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala are fighting to increase COVID Coronavirus pandemic News

Chennai, India – Rajendran Dilip is seriously in front of a 500-bed government hospital in Chennai waiting to be treated at a COVID-19 hospital for seriously ill patients at the city’s shopping center, where his 53-year-old father Rajendran was put in an ambulance a couple of hours ago.

Rajendran’s oxygen levels gave a positive COVID and began to decline within two days. It happened after taking the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine late last month.

“We tried several hospitals, both private and government, but there were no beds available. Eventually, when the oxygen level started to change, we had no choice but to dial 108, ”Dilip, 24, told Al Jazeera, referring to the emergency response number for medical, fire and police services in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

“They arrived in 10 minutes, and my father’s oxygen level, about 93, rose to 99 by the time we got to the hospital,” the 24-year-old computer worker said.

But not everyone in the hospital was as happy as Dilipen’s father.

Another man who did not want to be identified said he brought his father-in-law, who was 70 years old and had severe symptoms of COVID-19, to find that there was no bed available.

One of the hospital’s cleaning staff said the virus was a “silent killer” and saw 20 dead on Friday, the day after the newly elected state administration announced a two-week shutdown.

“How can we accommodate 400 people when there are 40 beds (available)? We would need hundreds more hospitals like this, and that too would not be enough, ”said the hospital’s sad nurse in the hospital’s“ control room ”COVID-19.

Tamil Nadu reported 26,465 new coronaviruses last Friday, a rise since then that began a year ago.

Over the next two days, reports of medical oxygen and lack of hospital beds across the state began to leak, reaching nearly 30,000 on the day of the case.

Mount Road in Chennai looks empty at the coronavirus shutdown [Kunal Shankar/Al Jazeera]

Things have not been very different in the adjacent Kerala, which announced a similar 10-day closure from Saturday. A day later, nearly 36,000 people in the state tested positive.

On Monday, Tamil Nadu reported 28,978 new cases while Kerala reported 27,487.

Strong health systems

In the two southern states of India, about 110 million people live (35 million in Kerala and 75 million in Tamil Nadu), they are often referred to as models of strong public and private health systems.

The first case of Indian coronavirus was found in Kerala on 31 January last year. But the state was able to effectively withstand the spread of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic, gaining worldwide applause.

Much of the state’s success is due to its political leadership, which overthrew a communist party alliance that returned to power on May 2 for a second term, beating the centrist alliance led by the Indian National Congress and Hindu nationalist leader Bharatiya of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Janata Party (BJP).

Kerala Health Minister KK Shailaja, a former school teacher who has already become the face of the COVID-19 state struggle, won his seat by securing the biggest victory ever in the state assembly elections.

The ratio of doctor and patient in Kerala is 25 per 10,000 people, better than 24.43 in Canada. Tamil Nadun is 16: 10,000, which is more than 10: 10,000 recommended by the World Health Organization.

The two states also began putting up emergency infrastructure early last year, expecting cyclical and saturated points from COVID-19 infections. Medical oxygen production increased and hospital capacity increased.

Their government also began classifying coronavirus patients into three categories – mild, moderate and critical – to ensure correct treatment so that deaths associated with the virus were lower than in other countries.

By the end of March, the death rate (CFR) in Kerala, which was the percentage of deaths from positive coronavirus cases, was 0.32%, while in Tamil Nadu it was 0.52.

Experts say, however, that the CFR in India will not provide an accurate picture of deaths because many people with mild symptoms go untested, along with a general report on the low rate of testing and the massive number of deaths associated with viruses.

Cases rise in the second wave

It was not surprising that Tamil Nadu and Kerala were more effective than other Indian states in sustaining the pandemic in its early stages.

But by mid-April, when the two states went to regional polls organized every five years and about 10 days later, infections began to escalate again.

Former Kiva health secretary Rajiv Sadanandan, who oversaw the state’s initial coronavirus response, accused him of “acting irresponsibly on the entire political class” during election campaigns. He said the administration expected an increase in the number after the polls.

Sadanandan added that the overwhelming “toughness” of the new strains of the virus was “shocking for us” and that the government had “ordered the panic button to be pressed and blocked”.

Journalist Beral Aravind, who works for the well-known Kerala Manorama news channel, told Al Jazeera that the monitoring and quarantine protocols developed during the 2016 Nipah explosion and the support groups of volunteers created after the 2018 floods have helped the state government.

Aravind said there is a widespread perception among the state’s population that if things “get out of hand” the government will take care of them.

Amid the nation’s shortage of medical oxygen, the Tamil Nadu government assured the Madras High Court on April 23 that the state had a capacity to manufacture 400 tons of oxygen compared to its need, which is 250 metric tons, and 1,200 storage capacity. metric tons, or three times larger.

Two weeks later, the government returned to court after the Modi government blamed the increase in the diversion of medical oxygen to other states, when the state’s demand exceeded its manufacturing capacity by 50 metric tons.

Tamil Nadu health secretary Jeganathan Radhakrishnan has told Al Jazeera that the state can deal with the increase if it cooperates with New Delhi. He said the central government’s “national allocation plan has hit us hard because a certain amount of our oxygen goes to other states.”

Experts attribute the rise in infection rates in both states to a significant number of diaspora returning from abroad.

Of Kerala’s 4 million displaced communities, more than half of whom returned to the state during the pandemic, nearly a million are now unemployed, according to government data.

Tamil Nadu is the most urbanized state in India, with about 50% of its 75 million inhabitants living in cities and towns. Kerala is often described as a state without urban-rural division, with the rural infrastructure of the rural area being comparable to that of the cities.

Kerala has the highest elderly population in the country, about one-fifth of the population over the age of 60, who suffer from COVID-19 infection. Tamil Nadu is third on the list.

Krishnamurti says he will not get the COVID vaccine because he thinks the side effects are worse than the cure [Kunal Shankar/Al Jazeera]

Rukmini, a Chennai data journalist, following the trajectory of the Indian coronavirus in his podcast, The Moving Curve, says these factors make Tamil Nadu and Kerala more susceptible to higher points in infections.

Rukmini said the basics used to measure success and failure need to be changed in the second wave. For example, in the cases of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Rukmini said “the real test of their health systems would be their ability to keep the number of mortality low,” as in the previous wave.

Ironically, reducing the infection rate in Kerala to about one-tenth of the population, almost half the national average, left a larger group of vulnerable people, according to the serological surveillance released by the Indian Medical Research Council in December 2020.

The question of vaccines is another problem in many parts of India, fueled by false news on social media.

Well-known actor Vive took his first dose of vaccine when he died in Tamil Nadu and speculation has spread since about the side effects of the shooting, although the hospital he treated announced that he died of a heart attack.

Thirunavukarasu Krishnamurthi, a 28-year-old autorickshaw driver, said his family decided not to get vaccinated after learning of the news. Her 90-year-old grandmother said she still “cooks, cleans and occasionally cultivates the fields on her own.”

“Why did he kill you with this injection?” he asked.