india

Updated: Apr 12, 2020 08:11 IST

On April 3, a sub-inspector of Bow Bazar police station saw a beggar, aged about 40, on a pavement on Jogendra Kabiraj Row in central Kolkata, suffering from fever and shortness of breath.

He was immediately taken to the NRS Medical College and Hospital, where his swab samples test report came positive. He was shifted to the infectious diseases (ID) hospital, the state’s nodal hospital for Covid-19.

The second incident was reported from the Tukra Patti area, where local residents noticed a 60-year-old homeless man on April 1 with symptoms of coronavirus infection. He was first taken to a local hospital and then to the ID hospital on April 6. A senior doctor of the ID hospital confirmed that the two street dwellers were referred to the hospital and that they tested positive. “I don’t want to comment anything on this,” said Siddhartha Chakraborty, officer-in-charge of Bowbazar police station.

The two cases, with no history of travel or known contact with previous patients, had worried both experts and policy makers. “It is difficult to trace contact history, as beggars living on those footpaths had been provided with food by several persons over the past few days, including private volunteers and policemen,” said an expert who is part of the state’s Covid-19 team.

“Going through media reports it seems that probably we are entering stage three (community transmission). However officially we are still in stage two,” said Dr Sumon Poddar, associate professor at Kolkata based Institute of Child Health.

The Union health ministry has dismissed speculation about community transmission, where the source of the disease is not known, but many experts have pointed to cases where authorities have failed to trace the source of the infection.

Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh confirmed community transmission in his state on Friday, claiming that about 15% of Covid-19 cases in the state were of community transmission.

A day later, two of the seven new cases in Punjab have no history of travel or contact. While one gardener found positive in Patiala was working in the house of a Punjab Civil Service (PCS) officer, the second is a truck-driver from Pathankot district, who had returned to his office after the lockdown.

In Haryana, officials said two percent of he 162 cases were of possible community spread, which includes a 38-year-old Rohtak resident, who has tested positive along with her two children, said Dhruva Chaudhary, the nodal officer for Covid-19 at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Rohtak.

In Ambala, a 67-year-old who died at the Chandigarh Post Graduate Institute (PGI) on April 1 and later tested positive for Covid-19, had no travel history, officials said. “In all these cases, we at least know the possible route of the contact,” said Haryana’s director general, health services, Dr S B Kamboj.

In Bihar, officials have not completed the contact tracing of 10% of the 60 coronavirus cases. Of these, four are from Begusarai and one each from Nawada and Patna. “We are ascertaining their travel history,” said Sanjay Kumar, Bihar’s principal secretary, health, while denying the possibility of community transmission of the virus. In Jharkhand, no contact tracking of one of the 14 Covid-19 patients could be established.

In Uttarakhand, Abhishek Tripathi, chief operational officer for COVID-19, said they didn’t have exact contact history of seven of the 35 positive cases.