Amid reports suggesting the rise of COVID-19 cases during the monsoon season in India, AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) Director Dr Randeep Guleria on Saturday said that he doesn't think there will be any dramatic change, reported India Today.
"I don't think there will be any dramatic change with the coming of monsoon. When summers came, there was a lot of talk that the virus spread will be halted but that did not happen," Guleria said.
Guleria added that symptoms of COVID-19 like fever may be seen due to diseases like dengue and chikungunya during the monsoon. So, it will be challenging for the doctors and there will be a change in terms of diagnostics, he said.
"We will see a change in terms of the diagnostics that doctors will need because a lot of vector-borne diseases like dengue, chikungunya also present with fever etc, can mimic some of the symptoms that you see with Covid-19. Therefore it will be a challenging time in terms of differentiating Covid from other diseases that we see to a large extent during monsoon," Dr Guleria said.
Meanwhile, India's COVID-19 tally crossed 5 lakh on Saturday with record single-day surge of 18,552 cases, according to data from the Health Ministry.
The COVID-19 cases surged to 5,08,953 while the death toll rose to 15,685 with 384 new fatalities being reported in the last 24 hours.
India currently has 1,97,387 active cases of Covid-19. So far, 2,95,880 have recovered or been discharged.
"Thus, around 58.13 per cent patients have recovered so far," an official said.
(With PTI inputs)
