Expert Refutes The Claim As No Patient Has Had Travel History; Outbreak Source Yet To Be Located
Bhopal: Manish Singh Indore Collector has blamed passengers who came from abroad and anti-CAA agitations within the entire city for the Coronavirus outbreak locally, although not a single of the city’s 892 patients has had an international travel history.
Health workers are in search of source and other corona infected people, Mr. Singh said, “There is no other medium. As many as 5,000-6,000 people returned from abroad and there were agitations going on in the city in which several people took part.” Indore was one of the major center of the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act agitation within Madhya Pradesh where the police had on an occasion reportedly roughed up some participants too.
Mr. Singh asserted, “Mainly this [Coronavirus] has come through flights, the medium being the airport. The situation has come to be because of passengers who came here in January and February.” According to the World Health Organisation, most positive cases begin to show symptoms within 14 days and mostly in five days infected person can feel the infection symptoms. The first case was reported in Indore on March 22.
Since he was not there in Indore back then, added Mr. Singh, so he did not know what exact measures were in place then. “Now, what directions were there then, what actions were taken then, I couldn’t find the time to find that out,” said Mr. Singh in Indore, which makes up 65% of the 1360 cases and 68% of the 69 deaths in the State.
After New Delhi and Mumbai, Indore has the third highest number of cases. Recently, the case fatality rate in the city, the largest and the most populous in the State, soared to 12%, the highest in the country.
A health expert involved in studying the pattern of the disease’s spread in Indore, requesting anonymity, said limiting the source of infection to international travel was unjustified. “It does not suffice for Indore, but may be applicable to New Delhi, Mumbai or Kerala which have several flights abroad. Indore has just one to Dubai,” refuting the claim of Mr. Singh.
He said “Such carriers may have had domestic travel history, bringing the infection from some other city,” during contact tracing, health experts are trying to find out the possible data of contacts and according to reports they may come in contact with international travelers in another city.
Once the virus crept into the community, it transmitted furiously in certain areas that are overcrowded. “The medium of transmission has been strong,” he said.
