Nagaland best in Covid-19 surveillance reporting in India, says study

Our Correspondent
Kohima, Sep. 1 (EMN): Two Indian research scholars at Stanford University, US, have rated Nagaland’s Covid-19 surveillance data reporting as the best in India.

In the letter to the Principal Director of Health and Family Welfare, which has been widely circulated on social media, Abeynaya Gnanasekaran and Varun Vasudevan, who were said to be pursuing PhD at Stanford University, wrote that they appreciated the effort of the Nagaland government in making Covid weekly bulletins available.

“Nagaland scored highest in our metric because of high-quality granular data reporting through weekly bulletins,” they wrote.

“By releasing the data, and its interpretation along with the public health recommendations, your government is empowering people to be proactive about their health. We encourage you to continue publishing such high-quality bulletins,” they added.

They went on to inform that some of them from the university had been evaluating the reporting quality of Covid-19 surveillance data from various states since May 2020.

They added that their “most recent paper (currently under review) evaluates and quantifies the reporting quality of surveillance, vaccination, and vacant bed availability data across 100+ websites and apps from national and subnational governments in India during May/June 2021”.

Letter not official

However, an official from the directorate of Health and Family Welfare told Eastern Mirror that the letter of the two scholars wasn’t official one but an “expression of opinion”.

The medical official said that the appreciation letter to the principal director was based on the students’ findings and that they might be conducting a survey on the Covid-19 situation in India for their PhD thesis.

“While collecting necessary information from different parts of the country, they must have found that the surveillance report provided by Nagaland was the best,” he said.

He also opined that other states were not providing timely reports concerning Covid-19 situation in their respective jurisdictions, and ‘so they thought Nagaland was the best state’ for issuing necessary information on public domains.