IMA Sounds Alarm Over Community Spread Of COVID-19

New Delhi: India’s coronavirus tally surged to 10.77 lakh cases on Saturday with the biggest single-day spike of 38,902 fresh cases since Friday, the Union Health Ministry said.

Besides, 543 new deaths linked to COVID-19 in the past 24 hours took the country’s toll to 26,816, the ministry added.

In more bad news, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) said that the spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in India has resulted in the community spread of the coronavirus disease.

India is the third country after the United States and Brazil to reach the grim milestone of over a million COVID-19 cases.

“This is now an exponential growth. Every day the number of cases is increasing by more than around 30,000. This is really a bad situation for the country. It now shows a community spread,” Dr VK Monga, the Chairman of IMA Hospital Board of India, told news agency ANI.

Dr Monga further said that the disease was spreading to smaller towns and rural areas, where it will be very difficult to control the situation. “In Delhi, we were able to contain it, but what about interior parts of the country in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Goa and Madhya Pradesh?”

The first to sound the alarm was Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who had said on Friday that there was community spread in some places in coastal areas of Thiruvananthapuram district.

A sudden surge in coronavirus cases in states like Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal has raised similar concerns, but the respective state governments have maintained that community spread has not started.