JOIN USHerd immunity not a strategic option for India: Centre
Herd immunity is not a strategic option for India in the fight against Covid-19, the Centre said on Thursday even as the disease continued to spread rapidly across the country.
Herd immunity can be achieved either through immunisation or after patients contract a communicable disease and recover from it, Health Secretary-designate Rajesh Bhushan told reporters here.
He said since a vaccine for Covid-19 was not ready yet, herd immunity was not a strategic option for India which has a population of 1.38 billion.
“It can only be an outcome, and that too, at a very high cost as it means lakhs of people would have to be infected, get hospitalised and many would die in the process,” Bhushan said and advocated COVID-appropriate behaviour such as wearing masks, avoiding gatherings and maintaining physical distancing.
India was fast approaching the 16-lakh mark of confirmed Covid-19 cases on Thursday, having added 52,123 new infections on Wednesday.
Bhushan, however, added that India had an actual caseload of 5.28 lakh patients as more than 10 lakh had recovered and got discharged from hospitals.
He said India had conducted an average of 4.68 lakh Covid tests daily through its network of 1,400 laboratories across the country, and 21 states had a test positivity rate of less than 10%. However, states such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka were still reporting more than 10% positive cases for the number of samples tested for Covid-19.
Bhushan said the effective way to control the spread of the disease was through surveillance and aggressive contact tracing for positive patients. He said such an approach had helped health authorities control the spread in the national capital.
He said the government has so far received 131 claims under the Rs 50 lakh Covid-19 insurance scheme for healthcare providers and payments have already been made in 20 cases.
“The claims are a bit slow in coming as the families are initially in a state of shock and therefore it takes time to sign and fill up the necessary paperwork. Out of these 131 claims, in 20 cases payments have already been made. In 64 cases, payment has been processed and would be made in the coming few days while 47 cases are with different state governments,” he said.