A day before restrictions are set to be eased in selected areas of the country, the Union Health Ministry reported on Sunday that 10 new districts that had not seen a fresh case in the last 14 days.
These are Gaya and Saran (Bihar); Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh); Fatehgarh Sahib and Rupnagar (Punjab); Bhiwani, Hisar, Fatehabad (Haryana); Cachar and Lakhimpur (Assam), the Ministry said at its daily press briefing.
All together 54 districts, spanning 23 states and Union Territories, have reported no fresh cases in 14 days and two — Mahe in Puducherry and Kodagu in Karnataka — have reported no cases in 28 days.
According to the Ministry, country will be graded as red, orange and green zones depending on the number of cases and hotspots, with the containment action and restrictions being most stringent in the red zones.
Hotspots are areas with large COVID-19 outbreaks or clusters with a significant spread or have at least 15 cases have been or where the 'doubling' of cases is less than 4 days. Within hotspots, local administration demarcates containment zones and buffer zones to control disease spread. There are 170 hotspot districts and 207 districts in the orange zone, that have at least one case. The rest, or about half of India's districts are in the safer ‘green’ zone.
Much of the relaxations are going to take effect in the green zone to kickstart the agricultural economy, Health Ministry spokesperson said.
The relaxations offered would be strictly monitored, a Home Ministry spokesperson underlined.
The Ministry reported 16,115 confirmed cases on Sunday with 2,301 cured/discharged and 13,295 active infections. There were 519 deaths reported so far. About 3.8 million tests had been conducted so far and 37,173 tests done on Sunday. Nearly a fifth of them were done in private labs, an ICMR spokesperson said.
However, concerns were raised about the descrepancy in the number of cases reported by the Health Ministry and the ICMR. Confusion reigned on Sunday regarding the actual number of covid cases registered on Saturday. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) that coordinates laboratory testing and is the central node of data regarding the daily number of infections reported that 16, 365 individuals had so far confirmed positive. Of these 2,154 were confirmed on Saturday alone — the first time ever the daily case load had breached the 2,000 mark.
However, the Health Ministry, which is the point-ministry for all information regarding COVID-19, reported only 14,792 cases and only 957 in the last 24 hours.
The discrepancy has prompted several questions.
“Numbers of positive cases put out today by the States, by ICMR and by Ministry of Health are conflicting and confusing,” former Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, tweeted.
“I rely on the dashboard jointly hosted by M/Health and ICMR. The difference between the dashboard number and ICMR’s number for April 18 is an astonishing 1,573. Will the M/Health and ICMR reconcile their reports from the States and report a uniform number every day?” he asked.
All of Sunday, the Health Ministry, which updates its figures once in the afternoon and in the evening continued to report the lagged figures. At the daily briefing, Joint Secretary in the Health Ministry Lav Agrawal, updated this to 15,712. By Sunday evening this had crept up to 16,115. But still fell short of the ICMR’s Saturday numbers.
A lag between the numbers reported by the states, the health ministry and the ICMR has been a constant since March, particularly after the lockdown. The Health Ministry explains it as happening because it reported numbers only after breaking it up by State- and-district and getting ground-level confirmation. This process, Mr. Agrawal said, led to the “occassional lag.”
The ICMR has also increased the number of labs and widened the pool of people it is testing. As of April 18 (Saturday), there were 194 government or state-funded labs and 82 private labs. All labs have varying capacity and this has contributed to delays in communicating data, said officials in charge of testing labs.
“The very act of sorting out samples can take upto four hours as not all of them are uniformly labelled. It can take upto 6 hours to process a batch (and the number per batch varies too) and generate reports and send. So fluctuations in daily numbers can also be because of processing times,” Rakesh Mishra, Director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, told The Hindu .
A high-level Task Force has been formed to work on the frontiers of science related to drug testing and vaccines. This task force is co-chaired by Member (Health), NITI Aayog and Principal Scientific Advisor to the Hon. Prime Minister. Apart from this, other members are representatives from AYUSH, ICMR, Department of Science and Technology, Biotechnology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), DRDO, Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) and Drug Controller General of India (DCGI). This Task Force will expedite coordination of work done by all Ministries on the issue related to vaccine development. This will further enable to speed up the research work carried out through international efforts by academia & research institutions. Also, Dept of Biotechnology has been a nodal agency for vaccine development. Their efforts will be focussed towards identifying pathways for vaccine development. Through the Task Force, the Government will further facilitate, keep track and monitor the progress of national and international efforts in vaccine development. The Task Force will focus on “clinical cohorts” which will focus on long-term follow up of people for having better understanding of disease and management, according to a statement from the Press Information Bureau.undertaken. There were 2,144 dedicated COVID-19 hospitals across the country that comprised of 755 dedicated COVID hospitals and 1,389 dedicated COVID Health Centres (DCHC).
There were five research groups internationally that were set to test potential vaccines in humans and a group at Oxford university, United Kingdom would have their results known in 6 months, ICMR spokesperson, Raman Gangakhedkar said on Sunday.
