Karnal: Haryana is battling a surge in Covid-19 infections, with positive cases rising to 3,845 in a single day on 13 April. Responding to the crisis, state Health Minister Anil Vij Monday announced a night curfew between 9pm and 5am. Health care professionals have said that the rise in cases is alarming and that the second wave is proving to be more dangerous than the first one, as in most of the country.
While the Covid positivity rate in the state is 4.86 per cent, in some districts, it is as high as 14 per cent. One such district, which is battling a steep rise in positivity rates, is Karnal, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s constituency.
The district recorded 327 cases Monday — the highest single-day rise in the district till date, according to data provided by the office of the civil surgeon (the district health office), Karnal. A day earlier, it recorded 264 cases, sources in the district health office told ThePrint.
“The number of positive cases in Karnal has gone up at an alarming rate in the past two weeks. Positivity rate is between 12 and 14,” Dr Yogesh Sharma, the district’s chief medical officer told ThePrint. “This wave is definitely more infectious compared to what we saw in the previous year. Earlier, one or two other members of a family were testing positive [if there was a Covid patient at home]. Now if one member contracts Covid, the whole family is testing positive,” he added.
Dr Jagdish Chander Dureja, director, Kalpana Chawla Government Medical College (KCGMC), Karnal’s dedicated hospital for Covid treatment, agreed.
“The infectivity of the virus is much higher this year. In April last year, we would get about 100 patients in a month, but now we have 150 patients admitted for Covid treatment,” he said.
Referring to the cycle threshold (CT) value — a marker of the viral load in a patient, which suggests the potential severity of the disease — Dr Abhinav Dagar, nodal officer, KCGMC, told ThePrint, “Last year the percentage of Covid positive people who had CT value lower than 20 was far less, which means that the infections are more severe this year.”
A lower CT value suggests a higher severity of the infection.
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The GT road problem
When the first surge happened in Haryana in August last year, it was mostly in areas close to Delhi, such as Gurugram, Rohtak and Panipat. This time though, the spike began in districts like Karnal, Kurukshetra, Yamunangar and Panchkula, which are on the GT road belt.
According to many health experts, the district’s location along a national highway, and its proximity to neighbouring Punjab, are among the reasons behind this latest rise in cases. The other reason is a lax attitude towards Covid-appropriate behaviour such as social distancing and wearing masks.
Karnal is approximately 120 km away from the National Capital, on the GT road, which is a part of NH-1, and passes through the several districts of north Haryana, connecting them to Punjab, where cases have also gone up drastically.
On 4 March, Punjab reported the highest single-day spike in Covid cases in five months. One reason for this is the high presence of the UK strain, a virus variant which spreads 70 per cent faster. The strain was found in 10 of 22 districts of Punjab in March.
“Karnal is situated on the GT road, which is used by many people to travel in and out of the district. Owing to its proximity to Punjab, there is a high influx from the neighbouring state. This could be a possible reason for the rise in infection rates,” said Sharma.
Dr Dhruva Chaudhry, head of the pulmonary and critical care medicine department at the Pt. B.D. Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS), Rohtak, also echoed the same views, and added that opening of schools and colleges have also probably contributed to the spike.
“Many NRIs have also returned to the state since the lockdown was relaxed and international travel opened up. The farmers’ agitation also threw those from Punjab and Haryana together, resulting in a high possibility of spread of infection. The re-opening of schools and colleges has also contributed to the spike,” he said.
Also, younger people are being affected more in the second wave of infection, Chaudhry added. “It’s not that the young were not testing positive last time, but this time, the number is proportionately higher, both among the asymptomatic and those who are sick,” he said, adding that what Haryana is experiencing could be the third wave of the pandemic.
“The number of positive cases went up in September. The second surge came around Diwali. And this can be the third surge in Haryana,” he said.
According to figures shared by the district health office with ThePrint, positivity rate in Karnal in January was 1.13 per cent, which declined to 0.91 per cent in February, the lowest positivity rate since last August (325 cases in a month). However, the positivity rate rose to 5.64 in March as 2,986 people contracted the infection that month, the district health office said.
“We are waiting for the results of genome sequencing, but we are sure that we are definitely going to find various strains [of the virus] in Haryana as well,” Dr Chaudhry said.
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Infrastructural concerns
After Gurugram and Faridabad, Karnal has the highest number of active cases in the state — 2,282 according to figures shared by the National Health Mission Haryana — and the lowest recovery rate in the state of 86.26 per cent. Gurugram has 6,459 active cases, with a recovery rate of 90.55 per cent, while Faridabad has 2410 active cases and a recovery rate of 94.45 per cent, according to the same source.
Karnal’s KCGMC hospital for critically ill patients, with a capacity of 536 beds, has dedicated 250 of these to Covid patients.
“Additionally, the hospital has a dedicated plasma bank and a Covid-testing lab, where 1,800 to 2,000 samples are being tested daily, ever since the number of cases started going up in March,” said Dureja.
Last year the KCGMC was converted into a dedicated Covid hospital for patients from Karnal, Kurukshetra and Panipat. The district authorities had shifted three major departments of the KCGMC — gynaecology, orthopaedic and surgery — to the Civil Hospital at the time.
However, the non-Covid services were shifted back sometime in December-January, after cases dipped. With the latest surge, the hospital has shut down elective surgeries, which are not part of emergency treatment, and is expanding its bed capacity for critical Covid patients.
As of Monday, 47 critical Covid patients were being treated in the hospital, of which 36 were on oxygen support and 11 were on ventilators.
“The top floor of the hospital was made into a Covid ward, but we have exhausted the space now. New patients are now being brought to the fifth floor which is being turned into another Covid ward,” said Dr Gaurav Kamboj, medical superintendent, KCGMC.
Senior health officials, however, are confident that the district is adequately equipped to handle the load.
“There are 250 beds in KCGMC and 150 in private hospitals, so we have around 400 beds. The occupancy is 25 per cent at present,” said Sharma.
Healthcare workers are also being kept on the ready to handle the crisis. While leaves of many among the hospital staff have been cancelled, recruitments are also underway to avoid manpower shortage, ThePrint has learnt.
A source in KCGMC told ThePrint that approximately 10 to 15 Covid specialists, and 75 junior doctors and general medical officers, are being recruited by the hospital.
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Vaccination hesitancy, rise in cases in rural areas
Another stark difference between the current Covid wave and the previous spikes in cases has been the reporting of more cases from rural areas in the district.
A health official in Karnal, speaking on condition of anonymity, told ThePrint that a near equal number of people from rural and urban areas in the district had tested positive since this March. This is different from the first wave of the pandemic, when the impact of the disease was less in rural areas.
Of 185 deaths in the state till Monday, 77 deaths were from the rural areas, district health officials told ThePrint.
The government is stepping up its vaccination drive to tackle this. On the first two days of the Tika Utsav (vaccination festival) that started on 11 April, Karnal organised 120 and 150 vaccination camps across the district respectively. More than 4 lakh among the population is above 45, of which 1,56,061 have been vaccinated so far, according to daily Covid bulletins released by the state.
However, family members of Covid patients contacted by ThePrint said that they were unwilling to get vaccinated since they feared adverse effects.
Twenty-year-old Kartik, whose grandmother has Covid and is admitted at a government hospital in Karnal, said that most of the old people in his village are averse to being vaccinated. “The elderly think that the vaccine will make them more sick, so why take a chance?” he explained. On being asked whether he was willing to be vaccinated, if eligible, he said, “No. We are young, nothing will happen to us.”
The district administration says it is working to tackle this hesitancy, especially in rural areas, by raising awareness.
“There are places where some people are spreading rumors against the vaccination. We have identified some such villages and have provided the list to the Block Development and Panchayat Officers. They are working to create awareness so that we can reach our vaccination target soon,” Sharma told ThePrint.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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