Pune’s Covid-19 tally at 23; central team visits city to decide if Covid-19 +ve woman at Bharati hosp case of community transmission

A woman in Pune, who does not have a history of travel to foreign countries, has tested positive for Covid-19 disease, the National Institute of Virology (NIV) confirmed

A woman in Pune, who does not have a history of travel to foreign countries, has tested positive for Covid-19 disease, the National Institute of Virology (NIV) confirmed on Saturday, sparking concerns that this could be India’s first case of community transmission of the highly contagious Sars-Cov-2 virus that has killed four in the country and infected 258 people.

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A central government team has visited the hospital where the woman is admitted to decide on whether the case is of local transmission or community transmission, said Pune divisional commissioner Deepak Mhaisekar on Saturday.

The 41-year-old woman, who attended a wedding at Navi Mumbai earlier this month, is a resident of Sinhgad road area, where Pune’s first two cases were reported. Pune accounts for 23 of the 63 cases in Maharashtra.

Mhaisekar said, “Six family members who came in direct contact with the patient have been isolated at their homes, while the driver of the taxi she hired has been quarantined at Naidu Hospital. The six samples are that of the driver, the patient’s sister, husband and her three children, who are reportedly minor.”

The case in Pune surfaced close on the heels of reports of a 20-year-old Delhi resident, who too did not have any history of travel abroad, testing positive for the coronavirus in Tamil Nadu. The government is yet to establish the source of infection.

“We have already traced over 100 people who had come in contact with the Pune patient and are also contact tracing those who came in contact with the four family members of the patient. This number may run in hundreds. A central government team has visited the hospital where the woman is admitted to decide on whether the case is of local transmission or community transmission. Officials believe that it could be due to local transmission if the patient came in contact with any positive patient, unknowingly,” Mhaisekar said.

With this case, the city has recorded a total of 23 positive cases. A 25-year-old man who returned from Dublin, Ireland, also tested positive, health officials said, expressing apprehensions that the woman’s case may take state into next stage of India’s fight against Covid-19.

There are four main stages of the deadly outbreak. Stage I is usually when cases are imported, without any local origin. Stage II is local transmission, which means a section of people testing positive have come in contact with a patient having a travel history. Stage III is community transmission, which takes place when the source of an individual’s infection can’t be traced and isolated. Stage IV is an epidemic, when there several clusters of the infection.

The Union health ministry maintains that there is no evidence of community transmission of the infection so far. According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), India is still at stage II of the disease.

Doctors treating the woman said she is critical and on ventilator in an intensive care unit (ICU) at Bharati Hospital. She does not have travel history to a foreign country, but visited Vashi in Navi Mumbai for a wedding on March 3, district collector Naval Kishore Ram said.

“We are investigating the case... She must have come in contact with someone who had foreign travel history,” Ram said, adding that the case has been referred to higher authorities.

The woman tested positive for the infection after her throat swabs were sent to NIV to check for possibility of swine flu (H1N1), he said.

The patient, brought to Bharati Hospital on March 16, is in a serious condition and was put on ventilator on Friday afternoon, Sanjay Lalwani, medical director of the health facility, said.

She is undergoing treatment in accordance with the recommendations of ICMR and the state government, Lalwani added. Dr Lalwani said, “She had initially come from a private hospital with complaints of fever and breathlessness. On March 16, she came to our hospital from a private nursing home since the patient’s sister is a senior nurse at our hospital. As per the information from her family, she started developing initial symptoms on March 3. After that she did take public transport to travel to Aanganwadi where she works as a sewika and also attended a wedding in Navi Mumbai. We have now also collected the swab samples of six of her family members including the sister and sent to NIV. They’re currently at home in isolation.”

Archana Patil, state health director, said ICMR recommendations suggest giving HIV (human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS) drugs to critical Covid-19 patients.

“As the patient is too serious, she is not being moved to the government quarantine facility at Naidu Hospital... we have demanded safety gears for our staff,” Lalwani said.