Villages report 57% of new cases in Odisha this month

BHUBANESWAR: Covid-19, regarded as an urban disease until sometime ago, has made deep inroads into the rural pockets.
An analysis by the state health department on Monday said villages contributed 57% of the positive cases this month. Simply put, more than one lakh of the 1.78 lakh new infections reported in May were from the villages. Rural areas had contributed around 51% infections in April, accounting for more than 50,000 of the total 1.01 lakh new cases. The rural infection numbers were negligible until March. More than 80% of Odisha’s 4.5 crore population live in the villages.
“However, the actual intensity of the spread may be much more as many people with symptoms in the villages are evading tests. I had fever around eight days ago. I immediately started taking paracetamol, antibiotics and vitamins as suggested by a medicine store owner. I am feeling fine now,” Sushant Pradhan (34), a native of Bhatpura village under Dumermuda panchayat of Jamankira block in Sambalpur district, said.
Sushant has his own reasons for not going for the test. “The nearest location where I could have given my swab sample for testing is Kuchinda, which is 15km away. I saw no point in going there twice, first to give the sample and then to collect the results. Many other villagers having fever are taking medicines without tests and are recovering well. The government is anyway asking people not to crowd hospitals, unnecessarily, and remain in home isolation.”
Several villages in Bargarh, Sambalpur, Sundargarh, Kalahandi, Nuapada districts have reported a spurt in the cases of fever. But a miniscule percentage of the population of these villages are coming forward for tests. Kermeli, a village under the Tabada gram panchayat in Sohela block, witnessed eight deaths of people with fever in the past one month. But only a few in Kermeli have undergone the necessary tests.
However, the high number of deaths in some villages is prompting people to go for tests. “It took a few deaths for villagers here to voluntarily come for the Covid tests,” Jiten seth, sarpanch of Machida gram panchayat under Lakhanpur block in Jharsuguda district, said.
Government authorities said ASHAs, anganwadi workers and ANMs have been trained to keep a hawk’s eye on possible infections and report them immediately. The Union health ministry on Sunday came out with an SOP on Covid-19 containment and management in peri-urban, rural and tribal areas calling for active surveillance of influenza-like illnesses and severe acquired respiratory syndrome. “We have been doing active surveillance long before the guidelines came,” Niranjan Mishra, director, public health, said.
Jayant Panda, government’s technical adviser on Covid-19, said Odisha has been following a decentralised model involving sarpanches and other panchayat representatives, which is helping to figure out any spurt in the number in any remote part of the state.
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