It is not just airports, the Karnataka government will now implement surveillance on inter state travellers arriving at bus and railway stations, wherein the passengers will be asked to produce a negative RT-PCR report. This was among the many decisions taken at a high level meeting chaired by Health and Medical Education Minister K Sudhakar, attended by senior officials of Health department, BBMP and state COVID-19 Technical Advisory Committee. Inter-state border checking is also set to become more stringent.
Bringing back the isolation measures used during the previous two waves, Sudhakar said that
once a person tests positive in the state, the command centre will call them, do tele-triaging and guide them for isolation or hospitalisation. Around 10,000 house surgeons will be part of the tele counselling and tele triaging, which will become important towards January end when the state expects hospitals to get overwhelmed.
"Though the central government policy is to only test symptomatic contacts of COVID-19 patients, Karnataka has gone one step further and decided to test all primary contacts. We are mulling over introducing a green pass or universal vaccine pass for people to enter public places such as metro, bus, malls, theatres, markets, restaurants, etc.
He shared that Karnataka has achieved 99 percent coverage of the first COVID-19 dose and 80 percent coverage of the second dose, standing third in the country. The state still has a stock of lakh doses.
Guidelines will be issued on who is eligible for hospitalisation as 85 percent of the people currently positive are asymptomatic. No VIPs, businesspersons and those with influence and contacts will be allowed to secure a hospital bed needlessly. All hospitals, especially in Bengaluru will have a nodal officer, IPS officer, IAS officer, BWSSB officer, BESCOM officer, Arogya Mitra to ensure seamless bed allocation.
"We expect 5 percent of the cases to require hospitalisation. Owing to our good vaccine coverage, the numbers needing beds will be less. We need to monitor the remaining unvaccinated population. Uniform treatment protocol, discharge policy and quarantine guidelines will be released," Sudhakar added.
As per data shared by him only 831 people have been admitted in hospitals out of 17,414 active cases and 700 of these are only using general beds without oxygen. At the meeting, the officials took stock of the medicine, testing kits, reagents, masks, PPE kits availability and what more needs to be procured.
In the last two waves, fake news on COVID-19 was spread on social media. This time, the government intends to take action against those who indulge in this. A panel of experts will be appointed as official spokespersons to speak to the media and public on COVID-19. Rubbishing rumours of lockdown, Sudhakar said that no such move is being planned by the government as it will affect the lives and livelihood of people.