Bihar Legislative Assembly elections will be held in Bihar in October 2020 to elect 243 members of  the Bihar legislative assembly. In the past one month, Bihar saw a fourfold increase in the number of COVID cases: from 26,379 on July 19 to 1,12,759 on August 20. The number of deaths too rose from 179 to 568 in this period. But senior State government officials attribute the spike in numbers to increased testing. Bihar has done over 20 lakh tests so far, they say, with the number of tests crossing one lakh in 24 hours in the past few weeks. “This has helped us in early isolation of infected persons and their treatment. Our strategy has worked, as is evident from the high recovery rate,” said a Health Department official. According to figures released by the Health Department, 84,578 patients have recovered so far, and there are 27,532 active cases. Officials also say the positivity rate has reduced since the first half of July, from around 13 per cent on July 15 to 2.89 per cent now. The recovery rate at present is 73 per cent.

But the opposition refutes all these claims, saying the numbers cited are misleading, considering the density of population. “In a State with over 13 crore people, if you have conducted 20 lakh tests in all, is this good enough? Besides, most of these tests are rapid antigen tests, which even the ICMR [Indian Council of Medical Research] says is not accurate. The number of RT-PCR [Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction] tests, which are accurate, is dismal,” said Prof. Manoj Kumar Jha of the Rashtriya Janata Dal. According to him, even if the high recovery and low death rate figures are correct problem on the ground remains serious because facilities for institutional care, which should have been augmented during the lockdown, remain abysmally poor. “Our [Bihar] government thought that the lockdown was a vaccine that would finish corona on its own. They did nothing to create facilities to handle the situation even though it was anticipated that cases would increase after migrant labourers started returning. What to speak of the common man, even for well-connected people getting a bed in a hospital is next to impossible,” he said. Many in Patna corroborated this view.

In Bihar, floods in 16 districts have compounded the problem. With almost all major rivers in spate, people have been forced to abandon their houses and live in crowded shelters, increasing the risk of infection manifold. “Protection from COVID demands social distancing, but floods have created a situation in which social distancing is anathema. You can imagine the plight of the people,” said Jha.

In the midst of all this is the likelihood of elections being announced any day. The Assembly elections in Bihar are due in November. Though all major opposition parties have appealed to the Election Commission to postpone the election in view of the pandemic and the floods, the E.C. has given no indication so far. In fact, senior E.C. officials told reporters that the situation was likely to improve by November and so elections could be held with precautions. Apparently, there are reports that the Commission could even employ out-of-the-box ideas like going for ballot papers or mobile election booths taking electronic voting machines to the people.