TCN News
A voluntary Indian scientists group ‘Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID19’ (ISRC), consisting of 400 scientists has released an official statement on April 8, regarding the prominent media blaming Tablighi Jamaat primarily for the spread of COVID19 even though the event was held on March 13.
ISRC was started by a group of Indian scientists working in different laboratories all over the world, who came together voluntarily in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially a scientists only group, it has now grown to include more than 500 scientists, engineers, technologists, doctors, public health researchers, science communicators, journalists and a number of students hailing from a range of disciplines affiliated to eminent research institutes of science and technology, universities, colleges, hospitals and private laboratories.
In its statement, ISRC aims to draw attention to World Health Organization’s statement that “We do not profile the cases on the basis of racial, religious and ethnic lines,” simultaneously reminding Ministry of Health’s advisory to “not label any community or area for spread of COVID-19.”
On the basis of both the above, the group strongly condemns any attempt to communalize the pandemic maintaining that the Tablighi Jamaat erred by not cancelling the event but the administrative lapse of the Central and Delhi governments must be acknowledged too.
Speaking on the testing and ground report, ISRC suggests that “available data does not support such a speculation that the Jamaat event was a super spreader.” It has added that such super spreader events have also taken place in various other places, for instance a single (now deceased) patient in Punjab led to the quarantining of 40,000 people from 20 villages in Punjab but it is not a solution to demonize any particular community for being the carrier of the epidemic. The group extends that the Government has not yet released data on how many tests were conducted among the attendees of this event and their contacts and so the fraction of tests that were found to be positive in this case compared to testing on the general population is unknown.
While calling on the government to release the data, ISRC has reiterated their call for the government “to collect more data — by testing more — and to transparently share this data with the public.”