Virus outbreak in India market could cause cases to snowball
NEW DELHI (AP) — Health officials are rushing to contain a coronavirus outbreak in one of Asia’s largest fruit and vegetable markets in the southern Indian city of Chennai.
So far, the market has been linked to more than 500 cases in several districts of Tamil Nadu state and adjacent Kerala state. Over 7,000 people with connections to the Koyambedu market are being traced and quarantined, said J. Radhakrishnan, the leader of Chennai's response to the coronavirus.
The market, which had remained open during India's six-week virus lockdown, is central to the region’s food supply chain. The challenge for public health officials is to track the many traders, workers and shoppers who visited the market.
Experts said the virus cluster has exposed India’s poor surveillance during the pandemic. They said the country’s long denial of how prevalent the virus was resulted in people not taking precautions, and warned that the market cluster could result in cases in India snowballing.
Crucially, public health experts fear that many who visited the market will not inform authorities, fearing stigma or quarantines, and that some workers weren't registered. Radhakrishnan said the state government is aggressively testing in response and has conducted over 170,000 tests so far.
Dr. T. Sundararaman, a community medicine expert, said such large gatherings are exactly where virus clusters are likely to emerge. “If you don’t look until it's too late ... it is a reasonable thing to suspect that clusters will emerge,” he said.
With 2,008 cases, including 545 detected in the past two days, Chennai now accounts for half of Tamil Nadu's total of 4,058 cases. Of these, over a thousand were detected in the past 48 hours and many were linked to the market, the state government said. India had a total of almost 50,000 cases on...
