India Not Off The Hook, Needs to Exponentially Speed Up Tests
Tablighi Jamaat and Dharavi have put a strain on India’s efforts to combat the coronavirus (COVID-19) spread. The government must proactively ramp up its diagnosing efforts, putting away its notion — that local transmission is not occurring in India. The nationwide lockdown is just a pillar of the tactic to combat the virus; the other two being contact tracing and rapid testing.
About 1.4 billion people got themselves self-isolated on 25 March, economic operations in the nation halted, exposing its poor and lower middle class to uncertainties. All this pain to break the pattern of transmissions and flatten the curve such that India’s fragile healthcare vertical does not get overwhelmed. Considering the number of confirmed cases, India seems to be doing a fairly good job. The idea lies in the number of samples being tested.
Either way, there exists a real threat that all the collective, concerted efforts might go in vain. Just one collective blow of intelligence breach, security oversight, administrative lapse, stumbled political will and criminal offenses of defiance and negligence from the organizers and attendees of the Nizamuddin Markaz event in New Delhi has pushed India to the edge of a catastrophe.
A paper in the New England, Journal of Medicine that analyzed the outbreak in Wuhan, China revealed that every affected patient would transmit the virus to at least 2.2 individuals. It doesn’t take Isaac Newton to realize that India is looking at a potential humanitarian calamity.
In an intermediate advisory, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has encouraged the adoption of rapid antibody test in the nation’s COVID-19 hotspots. The decision was put forth at an emergency meeting on April 2 of the National Task Force tackling the coronavirus transmission. According to the ICMR advisory, people living in hotspot regions might be tested with the rapid antibody test. While those tested positive would be confirmed by RT-PCR (Reverse transcription-PCR) using nasal/ throat swab, the negatives would be isolated at home.
Given its proactive measures, India had been quite able to keep a check on its COVID-19 caseloads but that one religious event led to an exponential rise in the epidemiological numbers, which underlines the need for total compliance. Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary at the Union Health Ministry, said at a daily press briefing that the number of cases has soared up notably in several states of India, with a majority of them linked to the religious gathering. Yet, he failed to add that the less number of cases was due to the significantly limited testing frequency in India.
The situation in India because of the Tablighi Jamaat spreaders is akin to that in South Korea wherein over half of the cases were connected to a secret religious sect — the Shincheonji Church of Jesus. One spreader had managed to get 37 people affected within a week, resulting in an upsurge in cases.
Even if we blame the Tablighi Jamaat to be the only source of community transmission in India, the time is ripe for the government to follow South Korea’s footsteps. South Korea spurred the testing frequency, and is an epitome of how to deal with the virus.
