Corona debate: Is India still at local transmission stage or the real data is substantially high
INDIA: Doubt have been emerged after Health Ministry Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal reiterated on Monday, said that there has been no community transmission but local transmission in India till now. Country reported its biggest daily rise in number of cases today, which is majorly due to a religious gathering held in Delhi two weeks ago.
India reported a record of 386 cases in the past 24 hours, pushing the active cases to 1,864 , the death toll is now 53 with 155 recovered/cured people so far, according to the health ministry of India.
The other picture that came to light and is worrisome, two coronavirus case was also confirmed from dharavi’s slum of Mumbai, which is India’s largest and is home to almost one million people living in close, unsanitary quarters.
According to the reports obtained, India spends about 1.3% of its GDP on public health, among the lowest in the world. Currently, only 47,951 tests have been done so far and there are just 51 government-approved testing centers across the country that is gruesome image for a densely populated country with 1.3 billion people.
As world’s highly developed countries are worst affected from this epidemic, India is comparatively running at very low in number of infected people regardless heavily populated. It is debatable that how India is maintaining the “no commission transmission” even when many potential carriers of the virus are untraceable due to lack of testing centers & people are not reporting their symptoms.
Authorities across India are scrambling to locate, test and isolate hundreds of people who spread across the country after attending a religious gathering at a mosque in the capital that has become a hot spot for the virus.
However, despite the upsurge in number of cases this week, the Indian government stands on the ground of not having traces of community transmission but the cases registered are either from those who traveled abroad or in localized incidents. Lav Agarwal, the joint secretary in the health ministry, told reporters “Nowhere have we said that there is a community transmission. We are still in a local transmission in this country.”