Vaccination holds the key
Covid-19 is again cornering people. Be it Maharashtra, Karnataka, MP, Gujrat, West Bengal or our very own Jammu and Kashmir, the cases are witnessing a surge. During the first week of April last year Jammu and Kashmir recorded below hundred cases per day and at that time a strict lockdown was in place to contain the virus spread.
Today we crossed the 400 positive cases mark on Thursday and every sector of the economy is open and functioning fully. Though many school children and their teachers have reported positive for the virus still everyone is holding on to continue with the education of the children and other activities involving the well being of the economy.
Given the situation that is arising and the opinion of the experts that covid is here to stay, a viable strategy needs to be framed so that people can go out to work and still manage to escape the virus.
A plan needs to be devised to strictly implement testing, tracing and asking people to strictly follow COVID appropriate behavior in all sectors. Secondly, a massive vaccination drive needs to be started to challenge the situation arising out of sharp rise in the number of COVID cases.
India over the past few weeks has witnessed a sharp rise in COVID cases. There has been almost a ten-fold increase in the number of new cases reported in February earlier this year and now.
Considering the deterioration in the COVID scenario a comprehensive approach of the Governments needs to be adopted to meet the challenge. This includes massive vaccination drive across the country so that the fight against covid can be more organized.
The governments need to ensure a multi-sectoral response in addition to swift vaccination drives to cover maximum population of the target age groups to prevent subsequent waves of infection especially in the wake of emergence of mutant strains of the virus.
At this juncture we have also witnessed some sort of hesitancy to take the vaccine among a huge chunk of population in Jammu and Kashmir. This sort of negative development should be taken care of immediately as a massive drive to aware the people about the benefits of vaccine and how vaccination alone can hold the key to defeat the virus, needs to be taken up.
We have already witnessed the fragility of our healthcare system. If the situation tends to grow like this then the healthcare facilities will once again witness the same burden that it had to undergo during 2020.
We in Jammu and Kashmir have witnessed close to 2000 deaths by covid-19 and lakhs have been infected. However, given our limited resources we have so far managed to avoid serious damage to the health and overall well being of the people here.
Though some complacency did figure during the past several months at some places and that is the reason that the cases started to grow once again, but we cannot ignore the virus threat especially when the tourist footfall to the valley has increased manifold.
KV Network
