The coronavirus spread has already reached the crucial phase of community transmission in Visakhapatnam district and the authorities are now focussing on conducting more tests to segregate the positive from the others.
There has been a spike in the last 40 days, as the cases have risen from 140 to over 5,000. But the real surge was seen in the last couple of days when the number of cases crossed the 2,000 mark. This, according to the district administration, is due to the intensive and focussed testing in the very active clusters.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the district administration conducted about 8,000 tests, with special focus on high-risk groups, in the 107 very active clusters and it yielded over 1,600 positive cases, which is about 20% of the test sample.
This indicates two things: that community spread is on and that people have started to develop immunity to resist the virus. This is a good sign and it shows that we are inching towards herd immunity, says District Collector V. Vinay Chand.
Herd immunity is a concept where one part of the population develops resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population, says district COVID special officer and principal of Andhra Medical College Dr. P.V. Sudhakar.
According to him, ICMR has already predicted that by September the pandemic will peak in India, but by that time, a large portion of the population will also develop herd immunity.
The focussed testing drive will continue for some more time and the State government has promised to provide adequate number of rapid antigen kits.
Low death rate
According senior officials in the Health Department, the idea is to keep the death rate low and that is why the focus of testing is on the high-risk groups such as people above 60 years, people above 60 with co-morbidities and people below 60 with co-morbidities.
"Though there has been a steep hike in cases, we have been able to keep the death rate below 1.2%," adds Dr. Sudhakar.
The number of deaths crossed the 60 mark till Thursday, from just three in the first week of June.
