Even as India faces mounting criticism for its limited testing strategy for Covid-19, AIIMS director Randeep Guleria said that the testing protocol will have to go hand in hand with India’s healthcare capacity, reports Teena Thacker.
“Our healthcare system is already working at a saturation point,” he told ET in an interview. Guleria said the healthcare sector in India will have to “reorganise” itself to deal with Covid-19 in terms of creating more facilities for Covid-19 within the same resources.
“We are working on strategies of creating space so that we can take the increased load of patients if they come. We should also try and prevent a spike in cases to an extent that will cause a major problem on the healthcare system.”
While tests on random samples done by ICMR so far suggests that there is no community transmission yet in India, Guleria said if India goes to the next stage, it will have huge problem in managing patients.
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“Given the health resources and the type of infection that we are dealing, if we go on to the next stage as it has happened in other advanced countries, we will have major issues in managing our patients because of the numbers,” he said. Emphasising that people should follow social distancing measures very aggressively to prevent significant community transmission.
Guleria is also the chairman of high level expert committee formed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to review the testing strategy for Covid 19 and said that testing will be increased in a step wise manner.
The committee is looking into widening the testing net by including atypical pneumonia cases, elderly people admitted in the ICU with severe respiratory problems and close contacts of Covid positive cases. For the close Covid contacts there will be a cut off time, which means that they will tested between the 7th-10th day of their coming in contact with the COVID positive patient. The new strategy will be out soon, he said.
“We will gradually look at other groups that we need to test like people admitted with unexplained severe acute respiratory infection in the ICU,” he further said.
Guleria said that efforts and all preventive steps have been taken so that India can be well prepared to deal with community transmission. “The idea is to delay it so that we can be more prepared in terms of training, hospitals and equipment and work on a strategy that we blunt the sharp rise and flatten the curve then it will be comeeasier to manage. If we have flattened the curve may be the cases increase but they increase in a manner that there is no acute rise the hospital systems will be able to manage it better. But if we have sharp rise and suddenly there is huge increase in numberof cases then the …the strain on the hospitalssystem will be much more”.
While he says there is a lot of work that has been done in terms of training, resources, getting isolation facilities ready so far, “only time will tell whether that was enough,” he said.
Source: The Economic Times
