National Center for Medical Emergencies director Skënder Brataj has confirmed that now Albania is facing community transmission of COVID-19.
Brataj said that, at this point, there could be no more talk of hotbeds wherein the number of infected cases was known exactly. “You can no longer know where you will get infected,” he said.
This means that health authorities in the country should now modify their containment and management strategy.
According to the World Health Organization, “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.”
At this stage, governments should concentrate resources on monitoring the spread and characteristics of the virus, identifying and managing severe cases, preventing onward transmission of the virus, alleviating strains on health-care services, informing the public, and reducing overall social and economic impact.
Additionally, testing strategies should shift towards monitoring the intensity of transmission, and plans should be made in order to manage increased volume.
In the case of large-scale community transmission, travel restrictions put in place to prevent the coronavirus from entering countries are also no longer necessary and should be lifted.
Despite Brataj’s assertion, WHO’s latest country situation report does not classify Albania’s transmission status as community transmission.
