149 new COVID-19 cases in 24 hrs
New Delhi: At a time when the number of confirmed cases increased by three times just in a week, it seems the Health Ministry's lethargy in finding patients infected with COVID-19 may prove fatal for the country as in the last 24 hours (Friday 9.30 am to Saturday 9.30 am), India reported 149 fresh positive cases of Coronavirus.
However, the total confirmed cases on Saturday till 5.45 pm was 918, out of which 819 are positive, 80 recovered and 19 died due to the virus. So in total, 194 confirmed cases were reported from Friday morning till Saturday evening.
Notably, there were just 283 positive Coronavirus cases last Saturday (March 21).
According to experts, many new positive cases would come into notice if the government increased screening of more number of suspects as so far only 30,000 people have been tested in the country.
In the last two months, more than 1.5 million people have come to India from other countries and most of them have not even been screened. Even though 64,000 people came to India from other parts of the globe only after March 21 alone, only 30,000 have gone through COVID-19 test.
"At present, persons with travel history to foreign countries have been thoroughly examined only after showing symptoms and when a person is found a positive case of COVID-19, then people and health workers who were in contact with the confirmed case is being examined, which is not sufficient to find the transmission chain," health experts mentioned.
According to experts, there have been many cases in many countries including the US, in which even people without symptoms were found to be Corona infected. Therefore, there's a possibility of increasing this risk in India by not examining people without symptoms, the experts highlighted.
However, ICMR's senior official has stressed that testing is being done at a large scale after the ICMR changed testing guidelines and allowed all Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) patients to be tested for COVID-19.
"There are many people with travel histories who have not gone through COVID-19 examination as they didn't disclose about their travels. And if after some time, some of them became confirmed cases, that doesn't mean that it has spread into the community," the ICMR official said.
"We are screening all SARI patients, so we need not worry about surveillances of affected people and testing random samples again," he said, adding that labs are still not fully utilised as only 30 per cent of it is being put into work.
"At present, we have a robust testing capacity. We have received over 5 lakh testing probes from America, which means we are now capable to conduct additional 5 lakh tests. Besides, there are enough reagents in labs to conduct over 1 lakh tests," the official added.
