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India steps up vigil as Covid infections increase globally
Due to symptoms similar to Covid, tracking SARI and ILI cases is one of the key surveillance measures proposed by epidemiologists to determine the spread of Covid-19.
All patients admitted to district hospitals across India for respiratory ailments will have to undergo testing for Covid-19 and the samples that return positive will then be sent for genome sequencing as part of India’s efforts to heighten its surveillance amid a global surge in infections, people familiar with the matter said.
“Covid surveillance is being intensified. All respiratory cases undergoing treatment in district hospitals, including those suffering from SARI (severe acute respiratory infection) and ILI (influenza like illnesses) will be tested for Covid-19 using the RT-PCR technology,” a senior government official said, seeking anonymity.
Due to symptoms similar to Covid, tracking SARI and ILI cases is one of the key surveillance measures proposed by epidemiologists to determine the spread of Covid-19.
“The samples of all those patients who test positive for Covid-19 will be sent for whole genome sequencing in one of the designated laboratories as part of the INSACOG network. If the caseload of a particular district exceeds the testing capacity of the designated lab, the samples can be diverted to other labs nearby,” the official added.
On Wednesday, Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya chaired a high-level meeting with officials in the health department and directed them to maintain a high level of alertness and surveillance, and carry out genomic sequencing aggressively.
The Centre’s decision of resuming scheduled international flights from March 27, the country’s vaccination status and the level of genomic surveillance were also reviewed in the meeting.
After a consistent decrease in the number of infections reported globally on a weekly basis since January-end, a surge of 8% was registered between March 7 and 13, the World Health Organisation has said in its weekly situation report.
“We need strong surveillance to detect #SARSCoV2 variants so that globally we can adjust interventions as needed. Now is the time to enhance the systems we put in place for #COVID19, not dismantle them. We can do this. We must,” Maria Van Kerkhove, infectious disease epidemiologist and WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead tweeted.
WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also warned the world against rising cases.
Also Read | Covid-19 surge: What WHO said, where are cases increasing, and why
“After several weeks of declines, reported cases of Covid-19 are once again increasing globally, especially in parts of Asia. These increases are occurring despite reductions in testing in some countries, which means the cases we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said on Wednesday.
The increase in surveillance comes at a time when the country is going through perhaps one of its best phases of the pandemic. India currently is going through perhaps the easiest phase of pandemic since the absolute start of the outbreak in the country in 2020. In the week leading to Thursday, there were 3,115 new cases reported across the country every day on average. This is the lowest this number has been in more than 22 months.
The country began administering precaution doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to healthcare workers, frontline workers and those aged 60 and above with co-morbidities from January 10. On Wednesday, India expanded its immunisation programme to include children between the ages of 12 and 15, along with everyone over the age of 60 being made eligible for booster shots.
In total, over 1.8 billion shots have been administered to nearly 970 million people across the country since the drive started on January 16, 2020. This means that around 89.3% of all Indians above the age of 12 (who are eligible for shots) have now received at least one shot of the vaccine.
Experts have repeatedly stressed on the need for genomic surveillance to track the virus.
“We have to be alert and genomic surveillance is the best way to track and contain new and sub-variants. Since numbers are low at the moment. the government can do large-scale genomic sequencing, which becomes difficult if the numbers go up because then they have to become selective,” Dr Navin Kumar, head of department and consultant clinical microbiology and infection control at Manipal Hospitals, said.
While India has not reported any infections caused by the BA.2 sublineage of Omicron variant of Sars-Cov-2 virus so far, the WHO said that the proportion of reported sequences designated BA.2 has been increasing relative to BA.1 in recent weeks at the global level.
“Discussions are also underway on how to conduct aggressive genome sequencing across the country, such as identifying a particular percentage of samples in a stipulated period of time, or adding more sentinel sites or labs to be able for early detection of any circulating variants,” the official quoted above said.
