NEW DELHI/PATNA: Nafis Faizi teaches community medicine at Aligarh Muslim University and hails from Bihar, known for having one of the weakest healthcare systems in the country. About 10 days ago, Faizi got a frantic call from his 70-year-old aunt in Bihar’s Samastipur, who was gasping for breath and needed his counsel.
She managed to see a doctor, her relative, who immediately advised her ICU support, seeing her alarmingly low oxygen levels but she could not find a facility in town where she could get it and was dead within hours.
“What happened to my aunt is happening in different parts of Bihar,” said Faizi.
“I am afraid the state is just not equipped to handle thousands of infected patients who will need urgent medical care.”
Although Bihar ranks low in terms of the total cases and also fresh daily cases, the Covid-19 situation in Bihar is considered alarming.
The reason is not far to seek. In the last 12 days, the state has seen the number of active cases nearly tripling.
On July 10, the active cases was 3,929 but stood at 10,220 on Wednesday morning, the 9th highest in the country.
The state’s growth rate of Covid 19 cases is 10% while the national average is 4.1%.
The growth rate of deaths is 3.2% as against a national average of 2.4%. In the last 11 days, the state has recorded 106 more Covid 19 deaths.
The worsening situation forced the state to enforce a two-week long complete lockdown starting July 16.
A central team which visited the state last week insisted that the measure, in itself, was not enough.
For the authorities at the Centre and public health specialists, it is the limited capacity of the state that is a major worry.
With an estimated population of 9.9 crore, Bihar has only 44 testing facilities in the government sector and 20 in private and very limited resources to help those who need treatment.
A research paper published by Princeton University, US, sometime back said the state, at 30,857 hospital beds and 1,543 ICU beds in both public and private sectors, had the worst health infrastructure.
“The pandemic is bound to sweep in each and every state and unless particularly backward states like Bihar do some smart planning and quickly identify and treat Covid 19 patients who are elderly and have co-morbidities, the death rate cannot be managed well,” said Dr Amitabh Banerjee, an epidemiologist at the D Y Patil Medical College in Pune.
State health minister Mangal Pandey, while conceding that the state has seen a rapid surge in new infections over the last two weeks, claimed that the testing capacity has now been raised to about 10,000 a day.
“The numbers of isolation centres are also being increased and 365 new ventilators have also been provided by the Centre,” he said, stressing that Bihar’s case fatality rate was only 0.71% against the national average of 2.43%.
But the spurt did not surprise some experts.
“This was expected and states like Assam, Bihar, Odisha are now seeing cases distributed across many districts,” said public health expert Oommen C Kurian.
“The difference is that now we have masks, PPEs, more ventilators and wards on wheels waiting on call. And we also know better what works and what doesn't. I'm optimistic that we'll be able to keep deaths low.”