India went past a bleak milestone on Monday as the number of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases crossed 10,000, with the infections doubling over six days and the government expanding containment efforts and ramping up testing in an attempt to curb the highly contagious pathogen from sweeping across the country.
On Monday, 1,253fresh Covid-19 cases were reported in the country. Delhi recorded its biggest daily spike with 356 cases. The national capital has recorded 1,510 cases so far, becoming the city with the most number of infections.Four people died of Covid-19 on Monday, taking the Capital’s death toll to 28.
Until March 24, there were 536 Covid-19 cases in India. The number rose to 2,520 by April 2; 5,305 by April 7; and the latest tally stood at 10,444, according to HT’s dashboard. Of these, 355 people have died of the disease that rages uncontrolled across several nations and has left at least 117,000 dead across the world.
The tally of Covid-19 cases first jumped in India after the detection of hundreds of patients who attended gatherings of the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary group, in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin last month. Once the cluster – the largest single source so far in the country – was identified and isolated on March 30, daily cases have surged.
The number of cases in Delhi increased from 72 on March 29 to 1,510so far — most of the 356 cases reported on Monday appeared to be linked to the Nizamuddin gathering. The Capital reported its first case on March 2, when a 45-year-old who travelled from Italy tested positive. According to officials in the Delhi government, about 1,050of the total cases are attendees of the Nizamuddin event or their contacts.
With the mass identification and isolation of such cases across the country, however, the focus has now shifted to how well the government can contain and localise the infections.
“The home secretary and the ministry of health communicate regularly through video conferencing with states and we tell them our containment strategies and they are working in coordination,” Lav Agarwal, joint secretary in the Union health ministry, said at a news briefing on Monday.
Experts say that the impact of India’s 21-day national lockdown — imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from March 25 — which appears to have relatively slowed the spread, could be undermined if disease clusters are not contained effectively, and people are not tested widely and aggressively. The next few weeks will likely determine the country’s trajectory in managing the outbreak and in preventing the health care infrastructure from being overrun by infections.
Modi will address the nation on Tuesday morning at 10am, and is likely to announce an extension of the nationwide lockdown, possibly with some exemptions to get the wheels of the economy turning again.
In about 100 days this year – the first case of the new disease was reported in China’s Wuhan late last year – Sars-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, has infected nearly 1.9 million people. The pathogen has spread across at least 200 countries, as even developed nations’ hospitals are overwhelmed, with many dying because of a shortage of medical equipment.
The Union health ministry said that 25 districts across 15 states that reported cases earlier had not detected fresh infections over the last two weeks, an optimistic statistic that stood in contrast to some states that have alarmingly turned into big Covid-19 hot spots.
The number of cases in Maharashtra surpassed 2,000 as it remained the state with the most Covid-19 patients across the country. Three-hundred-and-fifty-two tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday, taking the state tally to 2,334, according to the state’s health bulletin. Among the new cases, 59 were reported from Mumbai.
The Uddhav Thackeray-led government issued an official notification extending the lockdown in the state till April 30 after a previous announcement to this effect. “Since there has been no reduction in the number of Covid-19 cases… the lockdown was extended till April 30,” an official said.
Tamil Nadu, meanwhile, is the third state other than Maharashtra and Delhi to report more than 1,000 cases. The government in the state also announced the extension of the lockdown till April 30.
Eight doctors have contracted Covid-19 in the state, which said it was focusing on “aggressive testing” now in coordination with the private sector. The death toll from the virus in Tamil Nadu now stands at 11. While the state has scaled up its infrastructure to trace and treat patients, there have been other states that present worrying trends.
Rajasthan reported its highest single-day addition of Covid-19 cases on Saturday, with 65 of these being identified in Ramganj, Jaipur, which has become a hot spot for the infection. On March 29, the number of cases in Jaipur was 10. By March 30, the count doubled to 20. By April 6, Jaipur recorded 100 cases. As of Monday night, the case count was 897 across Rajasthan.
Madhya Pradesh has reported the highest death rate of Covid-19 patients in India, with almost the entire health department either in quarantine or in hospitals. Public health experts say the high deaths and spurt in cases indicate poor state response to the deadly virus.
Indore, the state’s industrial hub, has been one of the worst affected in the country. A 42-year old man died of the disease in Indore on Monday, taking the toll in the Madhya Pradesh city to 33.
While the government has created more than 1,200 containment zones across the country, much more needs to be done on the testing front to guard against the disease spreading undetected, they say.
Other than swab tests to diagnose the disease, the government is waiting to launch rapid testing kits that can check for antibodies and indicate if a person was ever infected with Sars-CoV-2, and if they have now developed an immunity to it. The rapid kits, however, are still to arrive from suppliers in China amid untraceable delays since April 8.
“The first consignment of some rapid test kits is likely to reach from China on April 15,” said Raman R Gangakhedkar, head of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), at a news briefing. The government also said that 200,000 tests have been conducted so far and there are enough swab kits to carry out diagnoses for the next six weeks.
An official said on condition of anonymity that ICMR is also considering “pool testing” to ramp up testing speed – under the procedure, labs pool samples collected from an area and test for the disease; if nobody tests positive, they move on, and only when infections are detected do they test individually.
