As India’s count of Covid-19 patients crossed 9,000 on Monday and while several states continue to grapple with large numbers of patients, 25 districts in 15 states have shown no new infections over the past two weeks.
Health officials have described the absence of new infections in these select districts as a “positive development” that illustrates how rigorous containment efforts can curb the spread of the virus.
Three states — Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu — account for 44 per cent of the country’s total number of confirmed Covid-19 patients, which was 9,352 at 5pm on Monday. Nine hundred and eighty patients have recovered and 324 have died.
Maharashtra on Monday had 1,619 patients in hospital, while Delhi had 1,154 and Tamil Nadu 982. The number of coronavirus-affected districts increased from 284 on April 6 to 354 on April 12 but health experts said this increase was likely the result of expanded testing.
“Testing more people increases the numbers but also helps identify cases and isolate them to prevent further spread of the infection,” said Oommen John, a public health specialist with The George Institute for Global Health, New Delhi.
But the health ministry’s figures reveal a great divergence in testing patterns. Delhi has so far tested 840 people per million, the highest in the country, while Bengal lags all the states with less than 50 tested per million, according to data from the National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai.
Health experts anticipate that the numbers of new cases will continue rising in all the states as they have done over the past three weeks even if the government extends the nationwide lockdown.
However, any easing of restrictions and any movements of people will likely increase the risk of transmission of the virus, the experts said.
The proportion of deaths among the confirmed Covid-19 patients also shows significant differences across states -– 7.5 per cent in Maharashtra, 4.8 per cent in Gujarat, 4.6 per cent in Bengal, 2 per cent in Delhi, 1 per cent in Tamil Nadu, and 0.5 per cent in Kerala.
Public health experts have cautioned that although such differences could result from early diagnosis and appropriate clinical management, this will not be clear without ascertaining the age-distribution of the patients across these states and what proportions of patients in each state had underlying illnesses, which increases the risk of severe Covid-19 illness.
A health ministry official said 25 districts across 15 states that had earlier reported Covid-19 cases had had no new infections for the past 14 days. These include Gondia (Maharashtra), Durg, Bilaspur and Rajnandgaon (Chhattisgarh), Davangere, Kodagu, Tumkur and Udipi (Karanataka), Wayanad and Kottayam (Kerala), Panipat, Rohtak and Sirsa (Haryana), Pratapgarh (Rajasthan) and Patna, Munger and Nalanda (Bihar).
Most, although not all, of these districts had only isolated cases of the infection which, public health experts believe, would have made it easier to contain the virus -– through contact tracing and the testing of any contacts with symptoms.