![\"IAS](\"https:\/\/static.theprint.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/WhatsApp-Image-2021-05-18-at-20.41.25-696x392.jpeg\")
Tirunelveli:<\/strong> District Collector Vishnu Venugopal seems to have a looming crisis at hand Sunday, when Tirunelveli only has three tonnes of oxygen left \u2014 enough to last till 1 am. But that\u2019s when the 35-year-old IAS officer\u2019s past work as a risk analyst with British insurance giant Aon\u2019s Chicago office comes in handy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Venugopal\u2019s hands-on live oxygen tracking and dashboarding of the Covid situation has made Tirunelveli the district with the lowest per capita oxygen consumption in the state of Tamil Nadu, even though it has a high Covid case load \u2014 as on 18 May the number of active cases in the district was\u00a0pegged\u00a0at 6,528.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t problems \u2014 Venugopal spends most evenings devising ways to make the oxygen supply last till replenishments arrive the next day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On this day, with just four hours left for the oxygen stocks to run out, the civil servant gets on a call with anaesthesiologists deployed in the 920 oxygen bed-capacity Tirunelveli Medical College, the largest Covid facility in the district, to chalk out a plan to last the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are surviving on an hour-to-hour plan, with limited oxygen and increasing Covid cases. Nights are the most challenging; that is the time when most patient distress calls pop up and the oxygen requirement shoots up,\u201d engineer-turned-IAS officer Venugopal tells ThePrint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mantra for Venugopal\u2019s model of governance amid the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is oxygen use optimisation. To reduce oxygen consumption in the district, the DC has, with the help of doctors, devised a three-pronged strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA month back, when cases started increasing, we assigned 30 nurses to only monitor the oxygen flow in patients. Our oxygen consumption was high the first two days, after which the nurses figured out the right amount of oxygen flow that should be maintained. Our oxygen consumption has dropped to 5.8 kilo litres a day, and we have maintained it,\u201d Venugopal told ThePrint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tirunelveli receives 0.3 kilolitres of oxygen from the Indian Space Research Organisation\u2019s (ISRO) Propulsion Complex located in the district, while the Tamil Nadu Medical Services Corporation supplies varying amounts of liquid oxygen according to availability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018oxygen\u2019 nurses, working in two shifts between 5 pm and 5 am, monitor its consumption by patients. Their job is to check the pulse oximetry of patients and maintain it to the lowest level required. Since oxygen is addictive when given in any amount, these nurses counsel patients and help recovering patients with demasking \u2014 the process of weaning them off oxygen masks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr K. Shantaraman, vice-principal of the Tirunelveli Medical College, explained the optimisation of the oxygen and dynamic pooling of oxygen beds by saying: \u201cThe treatment is not about giving patients volume of oxygen, but getting the inflammation down. Oxygen wastage is a common problem that hospitals are facing; we give optimal amounts of oxygen only to patients with 85-90 SPO2 levels.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He added: \u201cWe are using non-rebreather masks for moderately ill patients; this has helped reduce oxygen wastage. Not only this, we have kept the oxygen supply available to all beds. This means non-oxygen beds can anytime be converted into oxygen beds as and when required.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Additionally, postgraduate students of anaesthesia have been roped in to help with managing Covid patients\u2019 care, and some of them are deployed to keep an eye on the oxygen equipment and its flow. They also keep a check on the patients who need to be taken off oxygen if they have stable SPO2 levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vishnu Venugopal comes from\u00a0humble origins\u00a0in Kochi, Kerala \u2014 his father, a guard with the railways, passed away when he was in Class 8, and mother Sheela became the sole breadwinner of the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The young Venugopal went on to graduate from the National Institute of Technology in Tiruchirappalli, and also has a degree certification in port management from Belgium, and was awarded the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He worked as a financial risk analyst for Aon in Chicago in 2009-10, helping clients determine the level of risk involved in making a particular business decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Venugopal appeared for the civil service exam because he wanted to be actively involved in the nation-building process, and made it to the IAS in the 2011 batch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He says while the Indian bureaucracy seems like a mysterious \u2018black box\u2019 from the outside, it has the power to transform lives, and he wants to use the reach of the system to bring transparency in governance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Venugopal was promoted to the post of District Collector only five months back. Before that, he was a sub-collector, and his work was so appreciated that\u00a0villagers\u00a0renamed Vakaikulam, a hamlet where 45 families live, to Vishnu Nagar. They said this was their way of showing gratitude for \u201cbringing light to their dark village\u201d, as his initiatives literally brought electricity and water to their homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, as DC, Venugopal spends his afternoons speaking to doctors in the various blocks of Tirunelveli, having begun his day by inspecting Covid Care Centers and interacting with the public at 8 am. The barrage of calls usually ends at around 2 am, 18 hours later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike other Covid command centres across the country, the one in Tirunelveli stands empty. The person in charge, who did not wish to be named, said: \u201cAll our staff is working from home. We have a dashboard using which we communicate and do our tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Explaining the logic behind the move, the DC said: \u201cThese command centres can be potential super spreaders. In order to check that all the work is happening remotely, we have created a robust online system, with the help of which the team functions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One side of the dashboard, in Tamil, can be accessed by residents for Covid-related healthcare services. The administration\u2019s side of the dashboard, meanwhile, features details of every Covid patient, downloaded from the ICMR website. The district\u2019s Covid team makes regular calls to patients, and the collector says he listens in to 10 per cent of calls to check quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The district also started doing \u2018testing swipes\u2019 \u2014 camps were set up and a large number of people were tested to unearth Covid cases and prevent further spread. \u201cAs soon as we were able to identify the index case (the first documented case, which in this instance was a man working in Thoothukudi) in the month of April, we doubled our testing. Initially, our Covid numbers were very high, but that was because we eliminated Covid cases from the general populace early on with amped up testing,\u201d Venugopal said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn order to test more people, we doubled our testing capacity to 2,500 tests a day. Although private testing labs do contribute whatever little they can, the government facility pulls the maximum load. We have created three time slots throughout the day when the RT-PCR machines run at full capacity,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another challenge facing the IAS officer and his team is the safety of the Kani tribe that lives deep in Tirunelveli\u2019s forests. It is the age-old administrative dilemma \u2014 should any kind of intervention be made into an area with no Covid cases, or leave the members of the tribe alone?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSince they are far removed from civilisation, Covid has not reached them. We want it to remain that way; hence, no physical contact has been made with them,\u201d said Venugopal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He added that about 15-20 families of the tribe live deep in the forests, and even reaching them requires a 15-kilometre trek deep into unfamiliar parts of the jungles on the coast. Since there have been no cases in the area, he has chosen to not conduct a vaccination drive there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf at all they need anything, they reach out for help. All the tribal leaders have my phone number anyway,\u201d Venugopal said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Edited by Shreyas Sharma)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Source: How this IAS officer, a former Chicago risk analyst, is making Tirunelveli oxygen-smart (theprint.in)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" District Collector Vishnu Venugopal says Indian bureaucracy is like a \u2018black box\u2019, but can transform lives. Villagers have named a hamlet after him in gratitude for his work. SONIYA AGRAWAL\u00a019 May, 2021 1:00 pm IST Tirunelveli: District Collector Vishnu Venugopal seems to have a looming crisis at hand Sunday, when Tirunelveli only has three tonnes of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/static.theprint.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/WhatsApp-Image-2021-05-18-at-20.41.21-1024x576.jpeg\")
Oxygen optimisation <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
IAS officer with a hamlet named after him<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Command centre works from home<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Collector](\"https:\/\/static.theprint.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/WhatsApp-Image-2021-05-18-at-20.41.25-1-1024x576.jpeg\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/static.theprint.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/WhatsApp-Image-2021-05-18-at-20.41.24-1024x576.jpeg\")
Safety of Kani tribe<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n