A fisherwoman is seen at a fish market amid the spread of the coronavirus disease in Mumbai. (Reuters)
Murhekar said the second round of the sero-survey was underway and the results can be expected in late September or early in the next few months.
- News18.com
- Last update: September 12, 2020 10:42 am IST
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New Delhi: After facing much criticism for the delay in publishing the results of the first national sero-survey, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) finally released the study on Thursday night. The survey estimated that 64 lakh adult Indians had been exposed to coronavirus infection as early as May, indicating the scale of infections that the country’s health system has not detected, despite one of the strictest national lockdowns in the country. world that, in fact, reduces a billion people to a halt.
As of May 1, the month the survey began, India had reported 37,336 cases and 1,218 deaths. Even while admitting the delay in publishing the study results, lead author Dr. Manoj Murhekhar said the purpose of tracking trends in infections nationwide was served. The director general of the ICMR, Dr. Balram Bhargava, had made the operative parts of the sero-survey results public in the second week of June, however it took three more months for the top-tier national biomedical research body to publish a Peer-reviewed article on the topic.
“These findings are most relevant to that time period because we were in the early stages of the pandemic. The findings were shared with governments in June to aid decision making, and we also shared the consolidated data with state governments. These data were largely in the districts that we had mapped in the respective states and not in trends in specific cities, ”said Dr. Murhekar, director of the Chennai-based National Institute of Epidemiology, an ICMR institute.
Murhekar said the second round of the sero-survey was underway and the results can be expected in late September or early in the next few months. “In the second round of the survey, we will review the same 700 clusters and the same villages and districts. This will give us a clear idea of the growth and spread of the infection. In the second round, we are not going to focus much on categorizing districts based on case detection and will focus solely on seroprevalence, ”said Dr Murhekar.
Senior virologist and former director of Christian Medical College, Vellore, Dr. Jayaprakash Muliyil, who was one of the co-authors and was involved in the design of the study, said the second round of the national survey will be crucial in looking at the speed at which infections have spread.
“We are repeating the survey in the same areas, not in the same homes, it is because we want to see the speed at which the infection progresses. The previous survey showed that the disease had spread throughout the country. Although the districts were stratified according to case detection, most of them reported seropositivity. Even after all the containment and contact tracing strategies, we only selected a small fraction of the total number of cases, ”said Dr. Muliyil.
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