Telangana to come up with own policy for Omicron cases

HYDERABAD: In view of the increasing number of Omicron cases, the state is set to break away from current central guidelines of 15 days of compulsory quarantine for all patients and come up with its own policy.
State health authorities are in favour of allowing asymptomatic patients to remain at home while field surveys will be taken up to trace symptomatic cases. Terming the Centre’s policy unfeasible, the health department stated that since 95 to 97 per cent cases of Omicron are expected to be asymptomatic, putting everyone in quarantine centres will be a waste of resources.
“Since they do not have any symptoms, they do not require any treatment. Instead our concern is the remaining symptomatic patients who might require hospitalisation. The Omicron variant is spreading rapidly and is bound to spread further. In this scenario putting asymptomatic patients in quarantine may be useless. WHO’s policy and the Centre’s policy in this regard are not feasible,” said Telangana director of public health, Dr G Srinivasa Rao.
Substantiating the decision, the director of public health said that all 20 patients detected with the Omicron variant and admitted at the Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences (TIMS) are asymptomatic.
“There is no clear basis on which they can be discharged. There is no recovery to base it on as they were not having any symptoms in the first place. Currently, we are following the Centre’s guidelines on keeping them for 15 days before we can discharge them. However, there is no use of this quarantine. Instead of this, the policy should be to find symptomatic patients, test them, quarantine them and treat them before discharge. In Telangana, we want to stick to that,” Dr Srinivasa Rao said.