Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani. (File)
On a day Gujarat recorded the most coronavirus deaths in a single day, with more than 26 fatalities, on Saturday, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani on Saturday sought to play down fears surrounding the pandemic saying the state had witnessed over 300 deaths due to swine flu in a month in 2015.
The number of cases in the state has crossed 5,000 with 340 more people testing positive on Saturday. “In 2015, Gujarat witnessed 368 deaths due to swine flu in January. Coronavirus does not cause death but it is highly infectious, which is of more concern,” Rupani said in an interview with AajTak.
“We are focusing on testing and surveillance… nearly 80 per cent of our cases are from Ahmedabad and Surat. We are not panicking over our numbers but we don’t want the infection to spread further, which is why we have taken special measures… We are also increasing capacity in terms of our hospital beds in different districts to nearly 10,000,” added Rupani.
Commenting on the high mortality among those testing positive, Rupani said, “Tablighi Jamaat members hid their travel histories and kept travelling. Ninety per cent of Ahmedabad’s cases are from the interior area… Had we not used our intelligence inputs to trace the Tablighi Jamaat cases, we would have seen a higher number of cases… We are disclosing our figures with full transparency and we have seen that 85 per cent of the patients who died had co-morbidities…”