New Delhi: The Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare reiterated Friday that there is no community transmission of the novel coronavirus in India.
“There is no community transmission in India and there is no need to panic,” Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary, Health, told the media. But he added that the country still needs to be alert and aware about the disease.
The ministry’s insistence comes a day after the Indian Council of Medical Research released a study, reporting that among nearly 6,000 people hospitalised due to severe acute respiratory illnesses, 104 had been found Covid-19-positive, and of those, 40 had reported no foreign travel history or contact with someone who had travelled abroad.
However, Agarwal said most of the 104 positive cases in the study were picked up from ICMR-linked regional laboratories, in locations that have reported cases of coronavirus. He did add that cases that report no contact or travel history should be further investigated.
Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh said Friday that his state was possibly moving towards the community transmission stage, since 27 cases without travel history were found positive in a single day Thursday. “The 27 cases are not primary cases, as most of these are cases of secondary transmission,” he was quoted as saying by PTI.
Disease transmission occurs in three stages and ‘community transmission’ is the third stage, which occurs when the source of the infection cannot be traced. A standard operating procedure document by the ministry had called India’s current disease stage “local transmission and limited community spread”.
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Testing data
India has conducted 1,44,910 tests on 130,792 suspected Covid-19 patients in 146 government and 67 private laboratories, Agarwal said.
The country reported 678 new cases and 33 deaths Thursday, bringing the number of confirmed cases to 6,412, and the number of deaths to 199. Over 500 patients have recovered from Covid-19 and been discharged.
It took 59 days for India to report its first 1,000 cases, and only 12 days to report the next 5,000 cases.
The number of cases has been doubling every 4.1 days, the health ministry had said earlier.
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