While the liberal media of the country continues to disparage Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for wearing religion on his sleeve, the monk CM quietly goes about his business. Amid the second wave of the Covid pandemic, UP under Yogi Adityanath has managed to put up an admirable fight back, which has received accolades from the World Health Organization (WHO) itself.
According to media reports, the WHO has praised the work of the Uttar Pradesh government by surveillance, tracing, and testing of COVID-19 patients. On May 5, the Yogi administration initiated a house-to-house active case finding campaign in rural areas to contain transmission by testing people with Covid symptoms, followed by rapid isolation, disease management and contact tracing.
In #India's 🇮🇳 most populous state Uttar Pradesh, the state gov. has initiated house-to-house active case finding of #COVID19 in rural areas to contain transmission by testing people with symptoms for rapid isolation, disease management & contact tracing
👉https://t.co/pbDi98UByQ pic.twitter.com/7H2yXcU0if— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) May 10, 2021
To make the drive successful, the Yogi government has deployed 141,610 teams and 21,242 supervisors from the state health department for this activity to ensure all rural areas are covered. These monitoring teams of two members each, are visiting every rural household to test everyone with symptoms of Covid-19 using Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) kits.
The Yogi government is not leaving even remotest of the hamlets of the most populous state in the country. Monitoring teams have so far visited 97,000 villages to test everyone with COVID symptoms. According to a TOI report, two mobile vans have been allocated to each Block within a district in the state to test people with symptoms. The magnitude of the entire activity is much greater than the routine sample collection and testing, that is happening in Community Health Centres (CHCs).
According to the statistics of the Health Department of Uttar Pradesh, the total number of active cases in Uttar Pradesh has decreased by 94 thousand in the last ten days. In April, the second strain of the virus was at its peak in the state and as of April 30, there were over 3,10,000 active cases in the state but now it has reduced to about 2,16,000. The highest single-day spike of over 38,000 infections was reported on April 24 but fortunately, since then, there has been a steady decline.
“It was predicted that UP will see one lakh positive cases per day from May 5 but as on May 8, we reported 26,000 cases. It means our COVID strategy and management is successful. From April 30 we’re seeing a decline in cases and we also started special screening, testing in villages.” CM Yogi Adityanath was quoted as saying.
It is imperative to note that UP has been conducting over 2 lakh Covid tests daily, which goes significantly above on a good day and has been administering vaccines with a much greater pace, coming third on the list behind Maharashtra and Rajasthan.
While Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal continues to shoo away the migrant workers and labourers from the national capital, the monk CM is ensuring that they are paid money to sustain themselves when the government has imposed a statewide lockdown till May 17.
“Uttar Pradesh is the first state to not only announce maintenance allowance for workers, street vendors and rickshaw drivers but also make it available during the emergency (Covid-19),” the CM informed the media.
The fight against the invisible enemy is far from over and any lapse at the moment can breed severe catastrophe. However, CM Yogi Adityanath, whilst battling a divisive, partisan media and a raging pandemic simultaneously has given a good account of himself by fighting both gracefully.