After consistently releasing daily COVID-19 bulletins for nearly 33 months, Karnataka’s Health Department has stopped giving the daily updates since November 7.
Instead, the COVID data will now be updated on the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) on a daily basis. The daily bulletins have already been stopped in some neighbouring States, including Kerala, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The first one
The first COVID-19 media bulletin was issued on February 3, 2020, much ahead of the first case that was reported on March 8 that year in Karnataka. Back then, the bulletins mostly had general information on disease surveillance. The department started issuing detailed bulletins from March 2020 when international passengers began bringing in more cases. Subsequently, more indicators entered the daily bulletin from May 2020. A State COVID-19 war room was set up to collate information from districts, formulate the data and analyse trends.
The novel viral infection came to light after China reported a cluster of pneumonia cases with no known cause from Wuhan on December 31, 2019. Following that, screening and quarantine of international travellers began across the country on January 26, 2020.
On May 5 this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the COVID pandemic, saying it no longer qualifies as a global emergency. The action reversed a declaration that was first made on January 30, 2020, when the disease had not even been named COVID-19 and when there were no major outbreaks beyond China. Following this, on July 20 this year, the Centre stopped testing of international arrivals.
In consultation with NCDC
State Health Commissioner Randeep D. told The Hindu that the publication of State daily COVID media bulletins has been stopped in consultation and concurrence with the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) under the Union Health Ministry.
“However, COVID-19 data flow will continue on a daily basis through a special surveillance portal on the IHIP under Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP). The COVID media bulletin is being replaced with weekly infectious disease reports on the department’s website,” the Commissioner said.
Weekly infectious disease report
Sources in the department said apart from COVID-19 data, the infectious disease reports will include information of respiratory infections, vector borne diseases, water borne diseases, bites, vaccine preventable diseases and zoonotic diseases.
“While the reports for vaccine preventable diseases will be based on data received from 635 sentinel reporting units, the remaining will be based on data collated from 3,049 government and 832 private reporting units registered on IHIP,” sources said.
M.K. Sudarshan, former chairman of the State’s COVID-19 Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), said daily updates had become an insignificant activity now that the COVID disease transmission in the State ceased to pose a threat to the community at large. “The disease has become practically endemic. In recent months, the daily positive cases are in single digits (sometimes even zero), hospitalisations are occasional and deaths (mostly with COVID and not due to COVID) are rare. In this context, there is no need for a daily bulletin,” he said.
After the third wave subsided in February-March 2022, there was another minor spike in April this year just ahead of the Assembly elections. The Centre had then directed the State to conduct a COVID-19 mock drill to ensure operational readiness of health facilities for managing COVID-19 cases. However, the spike quickly subsided.
