WHO admits to gaffe, says there's no community transmission in India

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has finally corrected one of its reports that showed COVID-19 was in the community transmission stage in India. It said it happened due to an error which has now been fixed.

The Indian government has maintained that community transmission has not yet started in the country.

To this end, the WHO rectified the mistake in its latest situation report on COVID-19 published on Friday and said that India came under the "cluster of cases" category, not "community transmission" as stated in the earlier report published on Thursday.

The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Friday also said that there was no community transmission in India yet and the rate of the infection of novel Coronavirus is low.

"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," Joint secretary of the Health Ministry, Lav Agarwal said, in a press briefing.

For the unversed, the WHO has defined four transmission scenarios for COVID-19 -- no confirmed cases, sporadic cases, clusters of cases, and community transmission.

Community transmission refers to a large outbreak of local transmission.

The total tally of novel coronavirus cases in India reached up to 7,447, the Union Health Ministry said on Saturday. Of the total number, 6,565 are active cases, 239 are dead, one has migrated, while 642 people have been discharged after recovery.