Telangana does not provide info on 4 important Covid-19 parameters: Report

Hyderabad: Telangana’s state health bulletin does not provide information about four important parameters related to Covid-19, in comparison to other states, data revealed. The data, which was released by a crowd-sourced initiative covid19india.org, compiled the different data points released by states and union territories in their Covid-19 bulletins, using nine different parameters.

The first five parameters include data about testing numbers, total deaths by district, total recovered by district, total confirmed by district, as well the total number of cases. Out of these five parameters, Telangana does not provide information for at least three of them, including testing numbers, number of deaths, and number of people recovered by district. In addition to this, the state does not always provide the total number of confirmed cases by district, the data said.

In comparison to Telangana, Andhra Pradesh is a step forward by providing data for the five parameters. However, the consistency in providing age-wise and gender-wise demographic data, as well as providing travel history and contact history is not there, the study found. This is applicable for both Andhra and Telangana.

Out of the 27 states which were included in the list, 20 states have provided information for at least three parameters. These states include Maharashtra, Gujarat Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, which have a high number of Covid-19 cases, in comparison to the other states.

States that show the way in terms of data consistency

The report by covid19india.org found that Odisha and Karnataka have fulfilled all the nine parameters, by providing all the data in their respective state bulletins.

Other findings of the report highlight that there is a need for data standardisation in Covid-19 reporting across the states. Since, the study considered only state health bulletins and not district releases in the analysis, it was also found that state’s data was not integrated with district’s data.

For instance in case of Kerala, the researchers said that “details like demographics of patients and travel history, etc. are detailed in individual district collector's pages. This means that we have to monitor an additional 14 sources to fill these details. It would be great if these details were integrated into the state bulletin so that this information is available in one place for analysis.”