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Coronavirus pandemic: What is community transmission, has it started in India?

Community transmission takes place when there is no clear source of the origin of the infection. This is the stage we need to avoid as there is no way that the virus can be traced back to a certain person.

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By Newsd
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Coronavirus pandemic: What is community transmission, has it started in India?

With the gradual increase in COVID-19 cases in the national capital of India, the Kejriwal government is gearing up to prevent community transmission of the disease.  Till June 8, Delhi recorded 29,943 cases and 17,712 of them were active cases. In 874 people, the primary cause of death was the coronavirus.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said that half the cases in the capital cannot be traced to any source.

Sisodia after a meeting with the Delhi Disaster Management Authority said, “On community spread in Delhi, central government officials said it has not happened yet”.

However, a five-member committee set by the state government said that Delhi will have more than one lakh COVID-19 cases by June end.

What is community transfer?

Community transmission takes place when there is no clear source of the origin of the infection. This is the stage we need to avoid as there is no way that the virus can be traced back to a certain person. It starts when the identification of the infected after being exposed to someone who interacted with people from the originally infected communities can be done no longer. For instance, a community spread in the US means that cases are occurring in people who did not have any known contact with others from China, South Korea or Italy.

According to the World Health Organisation(WHO), community transmission is larger outbreaks of local transmission.

In India, a cluster of such cases has been identified in Dharavi and Worli in Mumbai, Nizamuddin in Delhi, Bhilawara in Rajasthan, and Koyambedu in Chennai.

Has community transmission started in India?

As the COVID-19 cases have spiked up making India the fifth worst-hit country by the virus, some of the country’s prominent public health and community medicine experts, including two members of an ICMR research group on the virus, have criticised the government’s handling of the pandemic and the lack of epidemiologists in decision-making.

However, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has denied the possibility of community transmission so far and said that the country is witnessing local transmission, clusters, and large outbreaks in some places.

Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain said that of the new cases being reported in the city, nearly 50 percent are those in which the source of infection is not known.

“We say community spread when people don’t know how they got the infection. There are many cases. In 50 per cent of the cases in Delhi, the source of infection is not known,” Jain told the reporters before the meeting at Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal’s home.

Jain further added “AIIMS Director Randeep Guleria had said there is community transmission in Delhi but the centre has not accepted it yet. We cannot declare it and the centre has to declare it. Community spread is a technical term and it depends on the Centre whether they accept it or not. There are four stages in epidemiology in which the third stage is the community spread.”

India on Tuesday reported a spike of over 10,000 cases, taking the tally to 2,66,598. Of these, 1.29 lakh are active cases, while there is nearly the same number of patients that have been discharged. The death toll is inching towards the 7,500-mark with 266 casualties in the past 24 hours. Maharashtra remains to be the worst-hit state by the pandemic.

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