India reported 40 Covid-19 deaths and 1035 new cases of the coronavirus disease in the last 24 hours, the sharpest increase so far, while the number of infections crossed 7400 Saturday morning.
The Union ministry of health data at 8am showed the country’s number of coronavirus cases jumped to 7447, including 6565 active cases, 643 cured, discharged or migrated people and 239 fatalities.
The report of the new cases comes of a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to hold a meeting with chief ministers of all the states to decide whether to extend the 21-day lockdown. The country-wide restrictions are to end April 14.
Punjab and Odisha have already declared they will not ease the strict restrictions and said they will continue till the end of April.
Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh said Friday that community transmission has started in the state with 27 positive cases coming from secondary sources, a claim contested by the Union health ministry.
Punjab, which was one of the first states to impose a statewide lockdown and stop public transport, has reported 132 Covid-19 patients till Friday.
“We had around 1,40,000 NRIs and foreign returnees, including from those countries where the virus had spread. They were the primary ones. Now, with 27 positive cases of secondary transmission, we have entered the stage of community transmission. That is a serious cause of worry,” Amarinder Singh said during a press conference.
However, responding to a question during the daily Covid-19 press conference in New Delhi, Union health ministry joint secretary Lav Aggarwal said there is no community transmission in the country yet and there is no need to panic.
“Today, the challenge is not local or community transmission. Whenever the community transmission stage comes, we will inform you. There is no community transmission in the country yet. There is no need to panic,” Aggarwal said.
The World Health Organization says community transmission is “evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases”.
Community transmission is the third of the four stages of the spread of an infectious disease. The first is travel history, the second is local transmission, the third is community transmission, and the fourth is epidemic.
The WHO in the latest Covid-19 situation report number 80 has termed India’s virus transmission classification as “cluster of cases” and not “community transmission” as of now.
The Centre has already reached out to state governments asking them to assess if some categories of services and people needed to be exempted from the lockdown, which many have seen as an indication that some restrictions will continue to be in place even after April 14.
In Maharashtra, the numbers of Covid-19 patients stood at 1872, according to the Union health ministry data, and there have been 110 deaths in the worst-hit state in the country.
In Tamil Nadu, there were 963 cases of the coronavirus disease with eight deaths. Delhi followed with 941 Covid-19 patients, out of which 25 have been cured and 13 have died.
There have been over 1.6 million confirmed cases globally, with the death toll topping 100,000 Friday.
The US reported 18,600 deaths on Friday as officials warned that fatalities would likely peak this week as then decline as there was evidence that the number of new infections was flattening in New York state, the epicentre of the outbreak in the country.
