Please help us by signing www.change.org/DeclareCommunityTransmission

Hello COVID fighters,

It has been a long time since I kept in touch with you. Soon after my last update, the Government of India announced a lockdown. So automatically this work from the home campaign seemed to achieve its goal. Or so I thought?

But then I soon read what my friend Siddhartha wrote about some major lapses on behalf of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Siddhartha is doing a postdoc in Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels (Belgium). This is an excerpt from what he wrote to me:

It has come to my notice that India entered the third stage of the pandemic, called community transmission, during March itself. This observation is based on two studies: 

Surveillance conducted by ICMR from Feb 15 - April 02 on SARI patients from 52 sites selected at random in India. (Read here: http://www.ijmr.org.in/article.asp?issn=0971-5916;year=2020;volume=151;issue=2;spage=236;epage=240;aulast=Gupta DOI : 10.4103 / ijmr.IJMR_1035_20)

2) Surveillance conducted by ICMR based on laboratory test results from January 22 to April 30. (Read here: http://www.ijmr.org.in/article.asp?issn=0971-5916 ;year=2020; volume= 151; issue = 5; spage = 424; epage = 437; aulast = ICMR DOI: 10.4103 / ijmr.IJMR_1896_20)

However, the clinical management protocol was devised by the Ministry of Health ignored this fact for unknown reasons which resulted in the failure of lockdown. What we are facing right now is a consequence of misinformation in pandemic management protocol that is primarily used as guidance by hospitals and test centers all over India. The first big step the government needs right now is to announce community transmission is on, if not the fourth stage (which is the actual stage), and make necessary changes in policies based on ground reality.

To ensure that our government acknowledges ad accepts the fact that we are in a community transmission stage, he went ahead and filed a petition:

www.change.org/declareCommunityTransmission.Wondering what good it will do to declare community transmission? Most importantly, it kickstarts a set of protocols which will protest our health care workers (HCW). As of now, not all HCW are adequately protected. This will also alert our fellow country men to be safe and they won't let their guards down, which even our Prime Minister Narendra Modi also included in his last address to our nation.