Tuberculosis amidst COVID-19 pandemic in India: unspoken challenges and the way forward

Abstract

India is home to the most significant number of tuberculosis (TB) cases around the globe. The COVID-19 crisis has deeply perturbed most of the essential TB services in India. Regulating TB is difficult in a densely populated country like India due to latent TB infection in millions of Indians, which can reactivate at any point in the future. Due to the ongoing pandemic, healthcare workers have been diverted to activities implemented for effective COVID-19 management, leaving a meager workforce to help deal with TB management. Integrating TB and COVID-19 to augment India’s health outreach is the need of the hour to diminish the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on TB. Increasing overall testing capacity, active screening, implementation of strategies for easy identification of TB hotspots, and ensuring uninterrupted drug supply for treatment through heedful planning of local and regional distribution and transportation will especially help cater to the vulnerable population who are at a high risk of suffering from adverse outcomes of TB. Lessons learnt in the battle against COVID-19 can most definitely help in providing insights to fulfill the goal of eliminating TB from India.