<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Nagaland’s COVID-19 tally of around 8600 as on October 25,2020 seems fairly high for some but low for others. In Arunachal Pradesh, the tally has crossed 14,000 while in neighbouring Manipur the COVID-19 tally stands a little over 17,000 in the same period. Presently, COVID-19 cases in Nagaland dip or rise but continue to steadily add to the overall tally. The official statistics issued by the department of health & family welfare(DoHFW) over COVID-19 cases after June had given rise to concerns that transmissions beyond the quarantine facilities have been largely under reported. The fact that transmissions beyond quarantines were showing a rise had caused apprehensions especially since many had no travel history nor contact with known source(s) of COVID-19. This fulfilled the criteria for describing ‘community transmission’. The fears of community transmission was voiced out during the month of July by many organisations. However, the DoHFW chose to toe the line of the ministry of health & family welfare(MoHFW) that there was no community transmission (in India) but a stage between local transmission and community transmission. By October, COVID-19 cases in India had crossed 78 lakhs as on October 25,2020. It may be recalled that when national lockdown was imposed on March 25,2020 the total number of COVID-19 cases in India was just 564. For whatever reason, the MoHFW has been playing down or underreporting on COVID-19 cases probably to justify that the lockdown has been totally successful. That may not be debatable but the fact that the figures have been trimmed does not make sense in a country with over 130 crore people.In order to grab headlines, the MoHFW has also cited the decline in COVID-19 cases from the high at around 90,000 cases per day in September to just around 60,000 per day in October. Even months before the pandemic, an IISc study by a group of noted scientists predicted that by January 1, 2021, India would have possibly reached close to 3 crore infected cases (over 60 lakh ‘active’ cases and 10 lakh fatalities). They also predicted that the pandemic is not expected to ‘peak’ before March 2021. Finally, after months of denial, Union Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan on October 18, had to admit that India is witnessing “community transmission”. However, by habit or requirement, he added a rider that community transmission has taken place only in districts within some states. Community transmission is not like a flood since it has already infected lakhs of people across India. The state DoHFW also admitted that transmissions were spreading but stopped short of acknowledging community transmission. The DoHFW disclosed that the positivity rate of 8.5% in the state was higher than the national average of 7.9%, while symptomatic cases have also increased to 4% and positive cases among people with comorbidities has also increased to 0.4%. With Unlock 5:0 many restrictions under Lockdown have been relaxed. This has resulted in “uncontrolled spread”of the virus in closed settings like restaurants, bakery, markets and religious community gatherings. These were dubbed as “super spreader events” where “super-spreading” , incidents of transmission where a large number of people can become infected from a common source occur. It was a clear vindication of what eminent scientists, medical specialists, epidemiologists and virologists have been saying all along since the month of May, that community transmission has already taken place in India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Overdue admission<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}