Govt says India not in community transmission stage, only 49 districts account for 80% cases

by Abbas Adil

New Delhi: Eighty per cent of Covid-19 cases in India are concentrated in 49 districts (of over 700 districts in the country), the government said Thursday, adding that the “unequal distribution” is an indicator that community transmission has not begun yet. 

Rajesh Bhushan, Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry, said at a briefing that India was instead witnessing “localised outbreaks”. “Even the World health Organization (WHO) does not clearly define community transmission and localised outbreaks,” Bhushan added at the government’s first briefing in nearly a month.

Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan also denied community transmission in India as he spoke to the media after the 18th meeting of the high-level Group of Ministers (GoM) on Covid-19. 

Community transmission is the stage of disease when the source of infection can no longer be identified.

The government’s claims run contrary to a guidance document released by the health ministry last week that suggests “limited community spread” in India may have begun as early as April.

According to the WHO definition, community transmission is said to have happened in “countries/area/territories experiencing larger outbreaks of local transmission defined through an assessment of factors including, but not limited to: 

  1. Large numbers of cases not linkable to transmission chains 
  2. Large numbers of cases from sentinel lab surveillance 
  3. Multiple unrelated clusters in several areas of the country/territory/area 

The definition of an outbreak is usually different for different diseases but denotes an uncontrolled spread of a disease.

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At the meeting Thursday, the group of ministers was briefed about the Covid situation in the country. 

According to a press statement, they were informed that eight states and union territories (Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat) contribute to around 90 per cent of the active caseload, while six (Maharashtra, Delhi, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) account for 86 per cent of deaths.

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