Declare Covid is in ‘community transmission’, save lives: Delhi Health Minister tells Centre

Satyendar Jain had made the request last June too, and reiterated it in a meeting chaired by Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan amid Covid surge across India.

File photo of Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain | ANI

New Delhi: In a meeting with Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan Saturday, Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Jain has urged the Narendra Modi government to accept that there is community transmission in the national capital, so that resources could be better used in saving lives, rather than focussing on testing, tracking and contact tracing.

Vardhan met virtually with health ministers from 11 states and union territories — Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, West Bengal, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, which are currently witnessing a surge in Covid-19 cases — to review measures taken for prevention, containment and management. The states sought help from the Centre, mostly to maintain supplies of oxygen and medicines.

Jain’s request came on a day when New Delhi reported 24,375 cases and the test positivity rate was 24.56 per cent. The city is fast running out of beds, oxygen, medicines, and healthcare manpower has been stretched to the limit.

The need to move on from the original strategy of testing, tracking and contact tracing has been felt in some sections of the government, especially among epidemiologists, for some time now, but the central government is in no mood to concede that community transmission is taking place.

Also at the meeting, Karnataka Health Minister Dr K. Sudhakar urged the government to put a stop to all social, political and religious gatherings as it is exposing the government to public ridicule.

Delhi’s request for ‘community transmission’ declaration

A source present at the meeting told ThePrint: “The Delhi health minister urged the government to declare community transmission. He said this would ensure that the city, which is already facing a lot of pressure on its healthcare infrastructure, can focus its resources entirely on saving lives rather than trying to track and contact trace, which is taking up a lot of time and manpower.”

Community transmission means that the health system has now lost track of the trajectory of the virus and infections are happening without the source of the infection being known. Once the government accepts community transmission, pandemic control strategy will move on to the next phase, which is the mitigation phase, when the focus will be to ensure that only those people get to the hospital who really need medical care. This would ensure lives are saved. Keeping track of infections or containing them would then no longer be the primary strategy.

While Delhi is going through an unprecedented Covid-19 crisis at present, this is not the first time Jain has mentioned the words community transmission. In June last year, when the city was going through its first surge in cases, Jain had said: “There is transmission in the community. But if it is community transmission or not that can be declared by the Centre only. It is a technical term.”

Senior health officials, including those from the National Centre for Disease Control, who did not wish to be identified, accepted that not just Delhi, but the whole country has been in a state of community transmission for a long time now, which is why localised interventions are essential to deal with the pandemic, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.

A senior epidemiologist working for the central government had told ThePrint last week: “There is a time for everything. There is a time for contact tracing and there is a time for mitigation. Do you think it is possible to trace 30 contacts every day for 1,60,000 plus cases?”

“Leave that aside. Just take Delhi. Even at 10,000 cases per day, that means 3 lakh (contacts) per day. So, for a 15-day period, which is the time these people need to be under surveillance, that is 45 lakh people. Do you think the state has that kind of resources? Contact tracing would work in states that are reporting a few hundred cases,” the epidemiologist had added.

Even within the health ministry, officials have said during meetings that the strategy for addressing the issue should be different for the 268-odd high-burden districts and the rest of the country.

Karnataka wants restrictions on gatherings

Karnataka Health Minister Sudhakar’s intervention asking for a full stop to all social, religious and political gatherings, was another notable point raised at the meeting.

Sudhakar said the governments, both at the Centre and in the states, are “starting to be ridiculed” for asking people to skip their livelihoods in order to break the chain of transmission while political leaders are attending election rallies. “He said it is causing a lot of angst among people and the Election Commission should urgently take a call on postponing elections,” said an official who attended the meeting.

(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)