WHO admits that one of its reports showing Covid-19 community transmission in India was due to error

The World Health Organisation (WHO) acknowledged that one of its datas had demonstrated coronavirus community transmission in India because of an error which has now been restored.

The government of India has maintained that community transmission has not yet begun in India.

The WHO rectified the errorin its latest situation report on Sars-CoV-2 issued on Friday and stated that India came under the ‘cluster of cases’ category, not community transmission as mentioned in the previous report put out on Thursday.

The Health Ministry on Friday also stated that there is not community transmission in the country as yet and the rate of the infection of Covid-19 is low.

Talking to the media, Lav Agarwal, Joint secretary said, “at least 16002 samples were tested on Thursday, of which only 320 people tested positive for Covid-19. Only 2 per cent cases tested positive. Based on the samples collected, we can say that the infection rate is not high although it is dynamic.”

The transmission scenarios in the WHO situation report are self reported by the member ststes. The WHO has described four transmission scenarios for coronavirus – no confirmed cases, sporadic cases, clusters of cases and community transmission that are being reported.

Community transmission apply to a large outbreak of local transmission.

The total number of coronavirus cases in India reached 7,447, the Health Ministry said on Saturday.

According to the Ministry data, out of the total, 6,565 are active cases, 239 are dead, while 642 people have recovered.

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