Community transmission may have already started: Experts

OUTBREAK Community transmission occurs when a person with no travel history to a Covid-19-affected country or known contact with a confirmed case tests positive

NEWDELHI: Has community transmission of coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak begun in India? It may well have, but we wouldn’t know because we are not testing enough people, say experts.

“Community transmission began in India two to three weeks ago, around the same time as other countries. India is not an exception to the way the virus behaves. We just haven’t tested a representative sample that the country’s population of 1.34 billion demands,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director and senior fellow at Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy.

Community transmission occurs when a person with no travel history to a Covid-19-affected country or known contact with a confirmed case tests positive for the disease. It indicates undiagnosed and often asymptomatic people are unknowingly causing infection, which makes it difficult to break the chain of transmission.

India must re-evaluate its strategy and test more people, according to the World Health Organization, as the country has reported 151 confirmed Covid-19 cases and three deaths to date.

“The situation is evolving rapidly. We need to scale up emergency response mechanisms to engage with people; find, isolate, test more cases and trace every contact; ready our hospitals and protect and train health workers,” said Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, regional director, WHO South-east Asia Region.

To detect an invisible epidemic, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which is entrusted with the responsibility of preventing new cases, is randomly testing around 2,000 samples of patients, who are suffering from severe acute respiratory infections (SARI). But 2,000 is too small a sample, say experts.

“Unless you test, you won’t know... In the initial phase of the epidemic, there are very few cases. So testing more people holds the key... Enough surveillance is not happening, we should test all cases of SARI in all our hospitals, especially cases of patients on ventilator support,” said a senior public health expert.

Since December, when it was first identified, the Sars-cov-2

SINCE DECEMBER, WHEN IT WAS FIRST IDENTIFIED, THE SARS-COV-2 VIRUS THAT CAUSES THE DISEASE HAS INFECTED AROUND 205,000 PEOPLE, AND KILLED AT LEAST 8,200 PEOPLE.

virus that causes the disease has infected around 205,000 people, and killed at least 8,200 people.

ICMR maintained that there is no community spread in India yet. People having mild disease and asymptomatic people unknowingly spreading infection in the community, say experts.

“If 80% people have mild disease, testing only 5% patients does not work because the rest will be moving around infecting more people, as it happened in

China, Italy and the US,” said the senior public health expert.

“All SARI cases must be tested. We need the private sector on board to step up testing and treatment to encourage people to come forward,” he added.