Even as the Government has repeatedly denied that India was in the stage of community transmission of Covid-19, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) has said the spike in the number of Covid-19 cases in India has led to community spread of the deadly virus.
The warning comes two days after Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said there is a community spread in some places in coastal areas of Thiruvananthapuram district.
The IMA, a representative of the medical professionals in the country, painted a disturbing picture noting that the disease is spreading to the rural areas fast while the situation is pretty bad in the country where the number of Covid-19 positive cases has crossed a million marks. India is now third country after United States and Brazil to reach this grim milestone. “This is now an exponential growth. Every day the number of cases is increasing by more than around 30,000. This is really a bad situation for the country,” siad Dr VK Monga, the Chairman of IMA Hospital Board of India, adding, “This is a bad sign. It now shows a community spread.
On July 9, Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan had said there is no community spread of coronavirus in the country. “There may be some localised pockets where transmission is high but as a country, there’s no community transmission,” he had said on the day when there were around 7 lakh cases.
In just nine days, the cases have zoomed to touch 11 lakhs cases while the death has crossed 26,500.
For the first time in India’s outbreak since March, the Covid-19 transmission rate has increased. India’s Covid-19 reproduction number, or R, which estimates the number of people infected by one already infected person, was on a steady decline from 1.83 for months since March 4. However, in the first week of the second unlocking phase in July, the rate has shown an increase for the first time, research by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai shows.
Dr Monga said the cases are penetrating down into towns and villages where it will be very difficult to control the situation. “In Delhi, we were able to contain it, but what about interior parts of the country in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Goa, Madhya Pradesh?”
There are concerns in states like Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal but the respective state governments have maintained that community spread has not started.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), meanwhile, said that it is ramping up testing facilities regularly. At present, 885 government laboratories and 368 private laboratory chains are conducting Covid-19 tests across the country.
As per IMA, 586 practising doctors, 566 resident doctors and 150 house surgeons have so far contracted the COVID infection while over 100 doctors have died due to the disease.