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Community transmission has begun in Punjab: Capt
Quoting experts and reports, CM says Covid-19 situation will peak by mid-September in India and 87% of people in Punjab may get affected
New Delhi: Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Friday claimed that community transmission has started in his state with 27 positive cases coming from secondary sources and insisted that the lockdown is the only way out to fight the deadly coronavirus.
Addressing a news conference through video-conferencing, Singh said, “The number of positive Covid-19 cases will increase as is happening across the world and even in India. How can Punjab be isolated from it? We have contained the pandemic to some level as compared to other states. But this will spread. We have kept our contingency plan ready and lockdown is one of the methods to cut social contacts,” he said.
Punjab, which was one of the first states to impose a statewide lockdown and stop public transport, has reported 132 Covid-19 patients.
The chief minister admitted that the community transmission has started in Punjab following 27 fresh positive cases with no travel history and most of them are due to secondary infection.
“We had around 140,000 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,” added Singh.
The chief minister said 651 people have come to the state from the Tablighi Jamaat’s congregations in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area, which emerged as the biggest Covid-19 hotspots in the country. Of them, 636 have been traced and 15 remain untraced.
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 Union health ministry has been consistently denying that India had reached the community transmission stage, insisting that it was still at the local transmission stage.
He admitted that there has been slow testing in Punjab due to lack of such facilities. “Out of the 28 million-population in Punjab, only 2,877 have been tested. It is nothing. That is because the Centre had initially approved only three centres and later added one more. Now, we have sought permission for more such facilities.”
Quoting experts and reports by some national and international institutions, including Chandigarh-based PGIMER and John Hopkins University, the chief minister said the Covid-19 situation will peak in India in mid-September at a point when 58% of its population will be infected, with 87% of people likely to get affected in Punjab.
“These figures are frightening. Predictions by health experts about the spread of the pandemic are horrendous. So, we have to do what we can and lockdown is one of such measures,” he added.
The chief minister also rejected as “absolutely insufficient” the ₹15,000 crore announced by the Centre on Thursday for the health infrastructure in the country.
“How can this be enough for the nearly 1.4 billion people of India? No state has the resources needed to fight the battle without the help of the central government and they have to come forward to help the states,” Singh said.
