Highlighting the need for increased testing, tracing and isolation of COVID-19 patients and their contacts, V. Ravi, head, Department of Neurovirology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), on Sunday said it was important to keep the test positivity rate (TPR) under 5%.
Delivering the 16th Prof. Arcot Gajaraj Memorial Oration through videoconferencing, Dr. Ravi, who is part of the Karnataka government’s task force on COVID-19, said that the State had managed to keep its TPR under 5% while the lockdown was in force.
“Once the lockdown was relaxed, cases surged, the rate of testing fell and TPR went up,” he said.
He added that keeping TPR under 5%, in any geography, was an indication that testing, tracing and containment measures were better.
He said it was critical to identify all symptomatic patients as they were the ones driving the pandemic. While the ability to spread the infection was around 19.4 persons for a symptomatic person, it was only four for someone asymptomatic.
Stressing the need for effective communication from the authorities, he said that though there was community transmission of COVID-19 everywhere, no State except Kerala had acknowledged it. Arguing that community transmission was not wrong, he said acknowledging it would help tackle the pandemic better.
He stressed on the need for data-driven interventions at the local level for better handling of COVID-19.
Chief guest Abraham Verghese, professor of Medicine at Stanford University and author, said that though the world had been predicting a pandemic for long and thought it was prepared, COVID-19 had proven it wrong.
‘Democratic virus’
“The virus, which is quite democratic and has crossed all barriers of nationality, caste, creed and religion, has united us in our vulnerability as human species,” he said. Saying that his country’s [the U.S.] decision to pull out of the World Health Organisation was “incredibly short-sighted,” he said that science was the only good news in the otherwise sad story of the pandemic.
“Within a week [of the outbreak], the entire genome was published. Several vaccine candidates are now in different stages of trials,” he pointed out.
V. Ramasubramanian, director of Capstone Multispecialty Clinic and consultant, Infectious Diseases at Apollo Hospitals, Chennai, said while developing herd immunity or vaccines were the only two possibilities to end the pandemic, the world was still not close to either. Highlighting that an infected person was likely to spread the virus even before developing symptoms, he said that testing, contact tracing, and the use of masks were crucia in arresting the spread of the infection.
A. Jaishree Gajaraj, obstetrician and gynaecologist and chairperson of Kausalya Gajaraj Charitable Trust, and others participated.
