New Delhi: On April 23, during a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief ministers of various states, NITI Aayog Member VK Paul made an alarming prediction for Uttar Pradesh: The state could hit 1.19 lakh daily cases in May surpassing Maharashtra, Paul warned, as the country suffered the impact of a rampaging second wave of coronavirus.
UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was also present in that meeting, suffering from Covid-19 himself at that time. The projection seemed ominous, given that UP had on that day reported a record daily number of 38,055 cases and active cases were up to 2.88 lakh cases, as the next day’s COVID report showed.
Lucknow had reported the highest 5,461 cases and the Prime Minister’s constituency Varanasi had reported the second-highest number of 2,786 cases. Adityanath made it clear to his team on the same day – such projections cannot be allowed to come true and everyone needs to pull up their socks, senior officials in the state government told News18.
The figures exhibit a huge turnaround now after exactly a month, with only 4,844 cases reported on Sunday and active cases down to less than 85,000 cases. Uttar Pradesh is, in fact, planning to be the first to relax the lockdown by some measure from June 1, if the downward trend continues. The death count, however, remains similar as a month ago with 234 deaths on Sunday, with hopes on June.
In the meantime, since being cured from Covid on April 30, Adityanath has been on a whirlwind tour of the state, visiting 12 out of the 18 commissionerates (comprising multiple districts) in the state so far and will tour the rest this week to take stock of the Covid situation in the entire state.
Multiple officials told News18 that these visits have had an impact on tightening the screws on the local bureaucracy and sending a message that the situation cannot be allowed to drift. A major intervention has been to increase testing, to avoid a situation where states lower testing to show lesser numbers of daily cases.
“A record 3.17 lakh tests were done today and less than 5,000 cases have come at a positivity rate of only 1.5%, which has crashed in a month’s time. UP has done the maximum number of 4.67 crore tests in the country and the recovery rate is up to nearly 94 percent. UP’s success in controlling Coronavirus is a result of this aggressive testing, tracking and treating strategy,” CM’s media advisor, Mrityunjay Kumar told News18.
Headline Management, Lakhs Dead: Opposition
Ajay Kumar Lallu, the UP Congress Chief, countered the UP government’s claims, saying, “It is all a baazigiri (fudging) of figures” and said the pandemic has, in fact, badly affected the villages. “The visuals are there for all to see – be it the floating bodies in the Ganga or the hundreds of buried bodies in the sands in Prayagraj. Our belief is that lakhs of people have died in UP’s villages due to Covid but the figures have all been managed to not record these deaths,” Lallu told News18. UP’s official death count due to Covid stands at 19,209 deaths.
Lallu also attacked the testing model of UP, saying a majority of rapid antigen tests were being done rather than the more reliable RT-PCR test, hence showing high negative results. “The RT-PCR reports remain pending for 15 days. It is headline management,” Lallu claimed.
Samajwadi Party’s spokesperson and MLC, Sunil Singh Yadav, said the CM while going on tours of the state should also go to the banks of the Ganga to know the “reality” and said, “The CM would only then know how much truth is being hidden from the country by his officials and his government.”
Lallu said that UP was also at the bottom of the list in the country in terms of number of people vaccinated per million and smaller states like Rajasthan had done as many vaccinations as UP while Maharashtra was ahead of UP. “In a state of 23 crore people, so far only 33 lakh people are fully vaccinated with both doses,” he said.
BJP Cites Yogi’s Work, Says Opposition Playing Politics
State BJP leaders, however, accused the opposition of playing politics over the pandemic, saying it wants to cash in on the tragedy for political advantage ahead of the state elections that are just 10 months away.
“The opposition knows it has no other issue against the Yogi Adityanath government besides cornering him on Covid, as the CM has run a corruption-free government. UP will be the first major state to go to polls after the second wave of coronavirus so the opposition wants to use this as a lifeline to revive itself in the state and raise doubts over its performance against Covid. However, this will not be successful. No state can hide deaths and there is an evident improvement in the Covid situation on the ground with hospital beds now going empty and no major Oxygen crisis in the state,” a senior BJP leader in the state told News18, preferring to remain anonymous.
Mrityunjay Kumar, the CM’s media advisor, cited how Adityanath had utilised his experience as Gorakhpur MP, when he oversaw running of the Gorakhnath Hospital and saw the child encephalitis situation fist-hand, to start making advance preparations for the second wave and order the setting up of paediatric wards in all CHCs and PHCs given the apprehension that the third wave could impact children more. The PM also referred to Yogi’s experience regarding this.
BJP leaders also said that it was a fact that UP has given the second-highest number of 1.63 crore jabs in the country and is also expanding the vaccination drive to all districts for the 18-44 category soon. They pointed to significant interventions on part of the CM, like the Common Service Centres (CSC) in all villages to also serve as vaccination centres-cum-registration centres so that villagers do not have to travel far for the jabs or queue up twice, first for registration at the CSC and then for a jab elsewhere at a PHC or CHC. “This step will speed up vaccination in rural areas and address vaccine hesitancy,” an official in the UP Health Department said. UP has also done the maximum door-to-door visits in villages for screening, testing and delivery of medicines. “All that has contributed to the stable situation now,” the official said.
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