No Community Transmission of Coronavirus in India Yet, Says Top ICMR Scientist as India's Cases Rise

New Delhi: Testing of 826 random samples of influenza-like illness and severe acute respiratory-like illness to check for community transmission have returned negative, Dr Raman R Gangakhedkar of the Indian Council of Medical Research told CNN-News18 in an exclusive interview.

Gangakhedkar said if community transmission is found and India enters Stage 3 of the COVID-19 outbreak, the testing strategy will change immediately.

“The strategy will be to detect more people and for that, we will have to enhance testing and make it more accessible,” he said.

News18.com had reported earlier that ICMR had begun picking up random samples of those who have been admitted to government medical colleges for respiratory illnesses, both mild and severe.

These random samples are usually sent to the virus research and diagnostic laboratories (VRDLs) network of ICMR. The ICMR was picking these samples and testing them to check whether community spread of coronavirus has taken place in the country.

Community transmission means there is a chain of transmission among those without travel history and the source of the transmission is difficult to find.

ICMR initially tested 150 samples across 13 VRDLs and between March 1 and March 15, they picked up 1020 samples across 51 labs, 20 per lab.

Of the 1,020, 826 have returned negative and results of 194 samples are still pending. “We are going to keep doing this and we are going to increase the sites where we are picking up the samples,” Gangakhedkar said.

When asked about the sample size and picking samples of healthy people too, he said, “These samples are being picked from hospitals where such people have been admitted. The size is proportionate to the number of ICU (Intensive care unit) beds. I cannot be testing asymptomatic people right now because as one may think, exposure may not be necessarily significant. That is why we are focussing only on hospital admissions.”

India reported 166 cases of coronavirus on Thursday. Three people have died of the disease which has claimed over 8,800 lives.