Punjab’s recovery rate of Covid-19 patients has gone up by 6.7 times in last four days. Having reported 223 recovered patients on Thursday, the state’s number of cured patients increased to 1,547 on Monday. A comparative analysis of recovery rate by the state government said that Punjab’s recovery rate was maximum in the country. Trailing on number two was Telangana with recovery rate of 64 per cent. On Thursday last week, Punjab changed its discharge policy by allowing patients with mild symptoms, and also those who have not tested negative second time, to go home following Centre’s new guidelines. The state is now claiming that as many as 1,547 patients were cured on Monday out of a total of 1,980 cases reported so far. The recovery rate on Thursday was 11.5 per cent with 223 cases out of 1,835 cases, it rose to 69.5 per cent on Sunday with 1,366 cases listed as cured out of a total of 1,964 , and went up to 78.1 per cent with 1,547 cases recovered out of 1,980 till date in the state’s media bulletin on Covid-19. The recovery percentage is more than double the national average. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh tweeted Sunday to say; “Happy to interact with my fellow Punjabis from Kapurthala who have recovered from #Covid19 & discharged from hospital. Happy to share that our recovery rate has improved to 64.6 per cent & our doubling rate is at 49 days. We’ve slowed spread of #Covid19, but we still need to work hard.” On Saturday, with state discharging 526 patients, the total number of recoveries was listed at 1257 taking the rate up to 65 per cent. It was double the national average. On Sunday, as many as 109 more patients were discharged. On Monday, as many as 181 patients were discharged. In the past few days as many as 940 patients have been discharged. It had implemented the new policy for the discharge of patients on Thursday. Since then it has been taking an affidavit from the asymptomatic, or patients with mild symptoms with an undertaking that they would remained isolated at their homes and would not venture out failing which action would be taken against them. When contacted about the ICMR guidelines on declaring a patient cured, Anurag Aggarwal, Punjab Health Secretary told The Indian Express that number of recovered patients was a “misnomer.” “There should be no such number. We should be concerned about only the number of new cases and the deaths. Rest everything is a misnomer. It is just a game of numbers which does not make any sense. Whenever a spike happens, people will get cured accordingly,” he said. While Punjab has not been following Centre’s guidelines in home quarantining those with mild symptoms in the past, it had decided to follow it on Thursday after many complaints from those in institutional quarantine that they were not being provided with basic facilities. Also, the government is expecting about 60,000 more people to reach Punjab from other states and abroad in the coming weeks. This would put a lot of pressure on the healthcare system and the government. Earlier, it was only institutional quarantining the returnees. A government official, on anonymity said, it was being witnessed that most of the patients with no symptoms or mild symptoms were not transmitting the virus further. Therefore, the decision was taken.
