COVID-19: Tirupati Temple Town in Distress

The entire temple town of Tirupati has been declared a containment zone for a fortnight. With rising COVID-19  cases the footfall to the temple was reducing rapidly over the past few days. The situation in Tirupati best illustrates what has been the disdainful approach towards the pandemic not just in Andhra Pradesh but in the rest of the country as well.

The temple was reopened for devotees on June 8. Since then “158 temple staff members, including 21 priests, have tested positive,” according to a report in The Print. The report says that the police had demanded the immediate closure of the temple. That decision to declare the temple town a containment zone has taken longer than it should have.  It was only on Tuesday that the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, the body in charge of running the temple, stopped the issuance of the 3,000 daily tokens, but continued to give the 9,000 daily online tokens. In fact, the virus has not even spared the senior Jeeyar of the temple, who tested positive on July 17 and was shifted “for better medical care” to Chennai.

Chittoor district, in which Tirumala-Tirupati is situated, has had to take “extra care” as the temple  attracts “a mix of native residents and floating population,” but has also had to deal with “invisible spreaders”. According to a report in The Hindu, there are about 236 patients who have tested positive, but since they had falsified their contact details, they remain untraceable, thus acting as spreaders.

What has got the authorities more worried is that the infection has spread to some rural areas as well. Although the cases in the town of Varadaiahpalem were a result of a resident returning from Chennai, any increase in the eight cases reported will only put a lot more strain on the stretched health infrastructure in the district.
With two well known institution, Sri Venkateswara Ramnarain Ruia Government General Hospital and Sri Venkateswara Institute of Medical Sciences, apart from nine other centres, the city has good health infrastructure, but with “50 divisions in the city registering more than 20 cases, some touching as high as 40, and the average mortality rate at 2.3% a day in the district, taking the number to 56 so far,” that infrastructure might quickly become insufficient.