Travellers from Dubai, UK primary sources of Covid importations into India, reports IIT

NEW DELHI: Travellers from Dubai and the UK were primary sources of COVID-19 importations into India, according to an analytical study done by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mandi.

According to the research, which has been published in the Journal of Travel Medicine, COVID-19 got induced into Indian states mainly due to international travels.

The study has also found that infected cases from Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh played less role in spreading the disease outside their communities. Whereas infected people in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir, and Karnataka played a significant role in the local transmission, and some of them caused interstate transfer too.

"We tracked the spread of COVID-19 and its diffusion from the global to national level and identified a few super spreaders who played a central role in the transmission of the disease in India. The COVID-19 spread in phase one was traced using the travelling history of the patients, and it was found that most of the transmissions were local," Sarita Azad, Assistant Professor, IIT Mandi, said.

"The research team has used the travel history of infected patients from January to April as the primary data source and a social network was created depicting the spread in the early phase of the pandemic. The research found that the maximum numbers of connections were established from Dubai (144) and the UK (64)," she added.

"Dubai's eigenvector centrality was the highest that made it the most influential node. The statistical metrics calculated from the data revealed that Dubai and the UK played a crucial role in spreading the disease in Indian states and were the primary sources of COVID-19 importations into India.

"Based on the modularity class, different clusters were shown to form across Indian states, which demonstrated the formation of a multi-layered social network structure. A significant increase in confirmed cases was reported in states like Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh during the first phase of the nationwide lockdown, which spanned from March 25 to April 14," she said.