Fever cases seemed to show a decline on Sunday with 9,289 people reporting with fever in various outpatient clinics in government hospitals across the State, as against Saturday’s figure of 14,631.
The inpatient admission also showed a decline at 377 against Saturday’s figure of 600.
Officials said there was the possibility that the reporting of cases was incomplete as it was a Sunday, and government labs might not be working in full strength.
With a better dissemination of the dengue management guidelines drawn up by the Health Department, the authorities have been trying to reduce the number of unnecessary referrals of patients to tertiary care centres and encouraging doctors, especially those in the peripheral areas, to manage cases better by classifying the patients into various categories.
Doctors said there was a tendency among doctors to refer a patient to a higher centre as soon as the platelet count dropped below one lakh in order to play safe and avoid possible accusations by patients’ relatives of improper treatment.
While patients are still crowding hospitals, doctors are trying to convince many that they need to be hospitalised only if their symptoms worsen and that dengue is best treated with plenty of rest and oral intake of warm fluids.
Though 87 suspected cases of dengue were reported, there were only four confirmed cases on Sunday. One suspected dengue death was reported from Kottayam. Of the four confirmed cases, two were from Kottayam and one case each was reported from Palakkad and Kozhikode.
The State has so far reported 2,750 confirmed cases of dengue and 10 confirmed cases of dengue death.
