AMC discontinues sharing whole lot of Covid19 related numbers with media

May 18, 2020
Ahmedabad Gujarat

Ahmedabad: Number of readers have on twitter asked DeshGujarat that why the daily list of Covid19 cases in Amdavad is no more published on the website for last two days. Such queries are obvious as the list used to be very useful for readers, to know whether there was any Covid19 case detected near their residence. Following are some of tweets in which queries have been made.

AMC has stopped releasing the list

To answer that, the Amdavad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has stopped releasing such list officially. The AMC would earlier send such list everyday in the evening to media persons, however such release was stopped with effect from May 16. The media persons continue to get such list through other sources, however such lists are not officially sent by AMC and therefore publishing them remains in question. (For an example the list below)

Less transparency

The announcement of new detected Covid19 cases was first made with names during the tenure of Mr. Vijay Nehra as Municipal Commissioner. Later for some reason, such list of discontinued. After a few days, the list was again sent to media persons regularly but without the names of the cases. The list would have many times fictitious or deliberately misleading names of locations, but at least the list was coming regularly every evening. Even after new municipal commissioner Mukesh Kumar joined the AMC office, this convention continued. However from May 16 evening onward, such list is not sent to media persons.

So what could have happened actually?

Senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member Ahmed Patel on May 16 questioned the number of Covid19 tests in Ahmedabad city in last few days. Ahmed Patel claimed that number of tests was decreasing day by day. However Chief Minister Vijay Rupani refuted the claim. Twitter argument between two leaders continued. On the same day, AMC discontinued dispatch of list of daily Covid19 cases detected in the city. The list was not sent on May 17 also. In the meantime, a meeting of AMC officials with the State Chief Minister, Chief Secretary and others through video conference was held.

Testing and other data is no more shared with media

The AMC under Mr. Vijay Nehra and also under the new commissioner (for starting few days) would dispatch daily two core press releases to media. One in the morning and the other in the evening. The morning press release would have total three pages in which the second page would mention the details of daily discharges of recovered Covid19 patients with the names of the hospitals/other Covid19 facilities. The same second page would also mention the details of laboratory tests. If you keep track of daily updated figures of total tests, you would easily calculate the number of daily tests and come to conclusion whether the tests are increasing or decreasing. The second page would also mention the figures of surveillance, category wise positive cases and more. The third page of the morning press release would contain a table of active case per hospital/facility.

On 17th of May, the morning 3-page press release didn’t arrive and therefore the daily testing data couldn’t be tracked any more. On 18th of May, morning press release was sent to media but it was just one-page release. Rest of two pages were curtailed. So testing data, facility wise cases, surveillance data, everything is now unavailable and no more shared with media.

3 page morning release – earlier convention

1 page morning release – a new practice

Two days but same testing data on AMC website

The ‘cases tested’ section on AMC website has now become static. For last three days only same figure of ‘44,493 cases tested’ can be read on AMC website. In such scenario, there’s absolutely no way out to track daily testing data and also some other data any more.

This article was in response to these and lot more queries by readers

#AMC #CoronaVirus #Media affairs

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