Delhi tally 97, Nizamuddin a hot spot At 32 per million, India lagging far behind on testing
Religious sect in focus as 24 test positive, 200 others show symptoms; 7 who were at gathering die in T’gana
nNEWDELHI: The headquarters of a religious sect in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area has emerged as one of the biggest coronavirus disease (Covid-19) hot spots in India with 24 people testing positive and nearly 200 others showing symptoms on Monday even as officials began evacuating the six-storey building of some 1,100 others who are believed to have been exposed to the virus.
The building belongs to the Tablighi Jamaat, an evangelical Muslim sect that hosted this month its annual congregation with attendees coming in from several nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia before they spread out to other parts of India such as Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh, creating a web of close contacts that now threatens to create an explosion of cases in the country.
“There are several foreign travellers who visit the complex for gatherings and prayer. We suspect the infection was first brought in by them,” said a senior health department official, asking not to be named.
The first indications of the site being a source of the disease came in the middle of last week when officials in four regions – Andaman, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kashmir – began working back the travel histories of patients who tested positive there.
Eight of these people, including seven who went to Hyderabad and one who went to Srinagar, have succumbed to the disease. The Hyderabad deaths took place on Monday.
All of them had been to the building in Nizamuddin — also referred to as a markaz — which shares a boundary with the police station and is close to the famous Nizamuddin Auliya shrine.
Shortly after, the district surveillance officer went to the area to screen people for symptoms and collect their samples. “Yesterday we got back the reports and six people had tested positive. Now our officers are there screening everyone in the area, anyone with symptoms is being taken to various hospitals. The operation will go on all night long,” said Dr Nutan Mundeja, Delhi’s director general of health services.
As officials began clearing the building slowly, the number of people showing symptoms for Covid-19 had risen to 188 by Monday evening and authorities expected around 300 more with a cough, fever or respiratory distress.
Till now, the most serious instances of the disease spread in India have been in large local clusters — such as the groups infected in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara, Maharashtra’s Sangli and in Punjab’s Banga. The patients linked to the Tablighi Jamaat have fanned out across the country, in some instances infecting locals, raising the spectre of having triggered community transmission.
The outbreak prompted the Arvind Kejriwal government to ask the Delhi Police to register an FIR against the head of the markaz. “A lockdown was imposed in entire India on March 24 and it was the duty of every owner and administrator of every hotel, guesthouse, hostel and similar establishment to maintain social distancing. It looks like social distancing and quarantine protocols were not practised here,” said a statement by the government.
A hostel-like complex, the building has six floors with accommodations for up to 2,000 people on the upper floors. The basement and the ground floors housing a kitchen and a communal dining area, which, officials fear, may have made the spread of the virus easier.
The 18 patients confirmed on Monday include people from Indonesia, Nepal, and the Indian regions of Kashmir, Assam, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.
The Tablighi Jamaat, a sect of preachers that travels across the world to encourage other Muslims to follow the faith, traces its origins in UP and has several chapters outside of the country.
The Tablighi Jamaat held its annual congregation this month, drawing in attendees from countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan before the international flight ban came into force
A similar congregation in Malaysia that began at the end of February has been linked to at least 500 infections in that country
nNEWDELHI: Nearing a month after the wave of Covid-19 infections began in India, testing in the country is a 60th of that in the UK, a 82th of that in the US, and a 241th of that in South Korea, highlighting an area where India continues to lag.
Although India has opened up testing to private laboratories — 47 of them — in addition to 127 government laboratories, questions remain about the availability of testing kits. On March 28, Dr Navin Dang, who runs Dr Dangs Labs, one of the private laboratories allowed to conduct Covid-19 tests, highlighted this gap.
Worryingly, questions also remain about whether the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has set unrealistic standards for testing kits. According to its guidelines, ICMR allows US FDA approved kits and European Ce-mark kits to be used after due approvals; for other commercial kits, it said that approval would be granted only to those who have a 100% concordance among both true positive and true negative samples (sensitivity and specificity) — a condition that several experts have described as unrealistic and restrictive.
Of the 17 commercial kits sent for approval so far, only four have cleared the parameters.
R Gangekhedkar of ICMR said on Sunday that the capacity utilisation of the body’s network of labs is only 30% — indicating that states can scale up tests. Gangekhedkar also said there were enough kits to conduct additional tests.
Till March 30, India has conducted 38,442 tests for Covid-19.
That works out to one in around 34,000 people, or roughly 32 in a million being tested. Germany, now the benchmark in