Akshay, the salesperson in charge at a retail chemist’s outlet in a suburb of Noida, offered a potential customer last week a tiny plastic bottle of a hand sanitiser priced at Rs 50 — barely enough for two uses.

“That would be Rs 25 to clean your hands once — more than the cost of bottled water,” the customer told Akshay and declined to buy the only bottle available in the shop.

A day later, someone else picked it up. Akshay said on Friday that he had nothing to offer.

“People who washed hands only with water are now buying sanitisers. People are scared. They have heard about this coronavirus illness; the Delhi government has shut down schools and cinemas. Everyone is buying sanitisers and masks,” Akshay said.

“But I can get you a sanitiser for Rs 90 by tonight,” he added.

India’s rising count of coronavirus patients, the periodic advisories from public health authorities urging people to adopt hand-washing and respiratory etiquette, and the social distancing measures imposed by some states may have had an unintended effect — a public scramble for masks and sanitisers that is worrying health officials and doctors.

The Centre on Friday notified an order declaring masks and hand sanitisers as “essential commodities”, citing concerns that these products are “not available with most vendors in the market or are available with great difficulty at exorbitant prices”.

The move announced by the consumer affairs ministry will allow the Centre and states to regulate the production, quality and distribution of masks and sanitisers and take action against speculators, those involved in overpricing or black marketing.

Two industry bodies had asked the health ministry to regulate the prices and quality of masks and hand sanitisers amid concerns that “unethical forces” are accentuating the shortages resulting from the surge in public demand.

The Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AIMED) had told the health ministry that certain private hospitals had urged some manufacturers of personal protective equipment to raise the maximum retail prices to eight to 10 times the hospital procurement prices.

“This has been happening even before the coronavirus (outbreak) — some ethical manufacturers have rejected such requests,” Rajiv Nath, AIMED’s forum coordinator, told The Telegraph.

The AIMED had earlier this week written to the health ministry about complaints it had received about the hoarding of protective equipment such as masks, gloves and hand sanitisers by distributors and traders.

The industry body estimates, on the basis of the information from 26 mask-makers, that India has a current manufacturing capacity of about 20 million masks per month but can ramp it up by an additional 5 million a month.

“We’ve requested the government to take stringent action against wrongdoers,” Nath said. There are indications that the domestic market is flooded with substandard and low-quality masks and hand sanitisers. Nath said the association had asked the government to build a stockpile of protective equipment and regulate prices.

“We’ve received queries from manufacturers about how they should handle unreasonable requests from private hospitals for them to label their maximum retail prices at eight to ten times the hospital procurement price,” Nath said.

The Preventive Wear Manufacturers Association (PMWAI) of India has also expressed concern that some personal protective equipment (PPE) and masks sold in India do not comply with the basic standards recommended by the World Health Organisation.

“We want the Centre to regulate the quality of PPE under WHO guidelines,” a PMWAI executive said. The government should also cap the maximum retail prices of masks, gloves and goggles, setting rational margins for manufacturers and distributors, he said.

Screening tests

Officials said India had ordered material for 200,000 additional screening tests.

The Union health ministry had till Friday documented a cumulative total of 81 coronavirus patients in the country, including the three earliest Kerala patients who have recovered. Seven other patients who had been admitted to Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital have also recovered, the health ministry said.

All the patients have a travel history or had close contact with people with travel histories. Health officials said that district-level disease surveillance units around the country were monitoring around 4,000 contacts of the patients.

A nationwide network of testing labs coordinated by the Indian Council of Medical Research has so far tested around 6,500 samples, ICMR officials said. “We have already procured the reagents and material for 100,000 tests — and have just ordered material for an additional 200,000 tests,” a senior ICMR official said.

Some public health experts believe it’s only a matter of time before community transmission is established in India.

Community transmission is defined as the point where a person picks up the infection without any obvious chain of contact.

Forty-four Indians brought to Mumbai by a special flight on Friday have been sent to a naval facility for quarantine, the health ministry said. Another flight is expected to bring more Indians from Iran on Saturday.

A civil aviation ministry official said an Air India flight would leave for Milan on Saturday and is expected to bring back Indians from the Italian city on Sunday.