Centre for tight curbs in 10 states

Directions come after a review meeting of the states, which account for 80% of the active cases in the country; state govts told to impose curbs on intermingling of people in 46 dists

With 46 districts in India still reporting Covid-19 test positivity rate of over 10%, the Centre on Saturday asked them to impose strict restrictions on intermingling of people. The directions came after a review meeting of 10 states that are registering a surge in cases, or positivity rate, or both.

As 80% of the active cases in these states — Kerala, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh and Manipur — are in home isolation, the government also asked them to strictly monitor the patients at home to ensure they do not spread the infection in the community. In the meeting, union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan warned against any complacency with around 40,000 Covid-19 new cases being reported daily since the preceding weeks and urged the states to ramp up their testing. There are also 53 districts reporting 5-10% of positivity, which suggests that the pandemic may not be fully under control.

The Union government said the states should focus on the districts with a positivity rate of less than 10% in order to protect these districts by focusing on saturation of vaccination.

In addition, states have been advised to conduct their own state-level serosurveys for district-wise disease prevalence data with the help of the ICMR as the national level seroprevalence survey was heterogeneous in nature. A recently-concluded serosurvey, based on samples collected from 70 districts in 22 states by the ICMR had shown that nearly 68% of the population of India may have antibodies against SARS CoV 2, confirming past exposure to the virus.