Most Indians don’t believe that India’s tier three, tier four cities, small towns and villages have the health infrastructure to fight COVID-19.
A survey said, 58% of the citizens believe the smaller towns and rural areas are underprepared to handle the fast-spreading virus cases. Only 5% believed they were prepared while 25% said they were somewhat prepared. Some 31% said they were quite unprepared while 27% said they were extremely unprepared.
The results of a poll by LocalCircles, a Community Social Media platform, was trying to gauge the collective pulse of the people on how the government should proceed with handling the situation. The survey received over 24,000 votes from 242 districts across the country.
The country has also been testing comparatively more in the recent weeks with the number of testing labs increasing from 1 in January to 1370 currently. The Government is saying although the daily number of COVID-19 cases are increasing, the numbers of daily recoveries are also rising steadily.
Since the relaxation of the lockdown, the number of districts with 1,000 or more COVID-19 cases has risen to 372 compared to 104 just a month ago and 20 on May 17 when India started relaxing the lockdown. This has made the citizenry believe the country is ill-prepared and the survey has indicated the people’s reservations.
Many survey respondents felt that India entered the lockdown too soon and exited it too soon as compared to most nations around the world. They also said there was a need for additional regional/local lockdowns if the country wants to contain the spread, a sentiment now being expressed by some experts as well.
After the U.S. and Brazil, India became the third country to cross 2.5 million cases of COVID-19, and now has the highest daily caseloads with over 60,000 cases being reported every day for a week. On 13th August, India recorded its biggest single-day spike of over 66,000 COVID-19 positive cases.
Meanwhile, India has ramped up its COVID-19 testing infrastructure and has conducted over 2 crore COVID-19 tests. The number of testing labs rose from 1 in January to 1,370 currently.
