On Saturday, March 28, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare released a standard operating procedure (SOP) for transporting a patient with either suspected or confirmed coronavirus infection. The government stated that this SOP was for the current phase of COVID-19 pandemic in India and defined the current phase as “local transmission and limited community transmission,” wherein as per the plan of action, all suspect cases are admitted to isolation facilities.
However, two days later, on Monday, Health Ministry officials vehemently denied the fact that the government mentioned the term community transmission.
“Technically, COVID-19 is still in the local transmission stage in the country as there has been no community transmission as of now," Health Ministry Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal told the media on Monday. “If we use the word 'community' anywhere, people are jumping to conclusions. We have to come out of semantics. Nowhere we are saying that there is community transmission. We are in a phase of local transmission. If need be, we will be the first to tell you.”
"It took 12 days for cases to rise from 100 to 1,000 in our country, which is comparatively better than several other developed nations, which have lesser population than us but have seen a bigger rate of multiplication," he said.
Dr Gangakhedkar, the head of the Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases-I (ECD-I), Division of the Indian Council of Medical Research had on Saturday (March 28) stated that about ten per cent patients suffering from Severe Acute Respiratory Illness (SARI) who were tested for coronavirus have been found to be positive for the disease and three of these patients do not have any exposure history.
The three persons from as many states — Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra — have neither revealed any recent travel history nor did they come in contact with an infected patient, health ministry officials said.
Dr Gangakhedkar had stated that 11 out of the total 110 patients with SARI who were hospitalised have tested positive for COVID-19 but he refuted the possibility of community transmission, saying that they have just started testing SARI cases.
"There are some sporadic cases where people are not revealing their exposure history but their numbers are not significant enough to assume that the virus is spreading rapidly. Till the time we see a significant number of cases to indicate community transmission, let us not over-interpret things," Dr Gangakhedkar had said on Saturday.
Meanwhile, according to the Health Ministry, the number of cases in India rose to 1,251 on Tuesday, a rise of 227 cases in the past 24 hours. Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal stated that the rise in cases can be attributed to the “lack of people's support and delay in timely detection" of the cases.
Dr Gangakhedkar told the media that as of Tuesday, 42,788 samples have been tested for coronavirus out of which 4,346 samples were tested on Monday.