The third and the most lethal stage of coronavirus spread is called the community transmission. It is the time or the phase when coronavirus spike exponentially in a region, area, city, state or a country. The World Health Organisation (WHO) places India in the cluster of cases category and not in the community transmission category. So what does community transmission mean? Let's find out.
What is community transmission?
Community transmission is when there is no clear source of origin of the infection in a new community. It happens when you can no longer identify who became infected after being exposed to someone who interacted with people from the originally infected communities. For example, community spread in the US, means that cases are occurring in people who did not have any known contact with others from China, South Korea or Italy, and got infected from someone from their own community.
Actions to manage large-scale community transmission of COVID-19 are suggested in these priority areas:
- Incident management, planning and multisectoral coordination
- Surveillance and risk assessment
- Laboratory
- Clinical management and health-care services
- Infection prevention and control
- Non-pharmaceutical public health measures
- Risk communication
- Points of entry
- Operational logistics
In a large-scale community transmission scenario, individual case identification, contact tracing, and quarantining are no longer necessary. Instead, surveillance will focus on monitoring trends for geographical spread, transmission intensity, affected populations, virological features, and impacts on health-care services. This multisource information informs ongoing risk assessments for decision making on appropriate public health measure.
WHO's recommended Actions
- Maintain international reporting to WHO via IHR reporting mechanisms.
- Review COVID-19 case definitions and disseminate to public health units, health-care facilities, surveillance sites, laboratories and points of entry.
- Develop surveillance strategies to actively monitor disease trends and impacts. Leverage existing surveillance systems to collect data (such as event- and indicator-based surveillance for influenza-like illness (ILI), severe acute respiratory illness (SARI), acute febrile illness and pneumonia, notifiable disease surveillance system) and supplement with ad hoc indicators if needed (such as school absenteeism at sentinel sites, sales of over-the-counter medications).
- Develop sampling strategies for virological testing to monitor transmission intensity, in coordination with laboratory and clinical management focal points.
- Prepare staff and establish procedures to conduct systematic risk assessments. Use approaches that synthesize multiple sources of information for risk assessment to inform response decisions (for example epidemic analysis for response decision-making).
- Establish mechanisms to use surveillance analysis and risk assessments to review control measures and response plans.
