COVID-19 and Tuberculosis Notifications in India: The Dilemma in Public Health Management

While the recent COVID-19 pandemic struck a severe blow to the Indian healthcare system and economy at large within a short span of time claiming lives and livelihood, tuberculosis (TB)—an age-old infection, continues to plague the country, despite a dedicated public TB program functioning across the nation for more than two decades now. Diversion of resources from TB to COVID-19 management threatened to negate any recent progress in reducing the burden of TB in India as well as globally. Specifically, challenges in access to healthcare during the pandemic led to a spiralling in both underdiagnosis and underreporting of TB cases. The current research attempts to explore the status of TB notifications in India in the wake of the recent pandemic. The study uses data relating to notified TB cases from the NIKSHAY portal of the Government of India and employs simple descriptive statistics and tools for graphical representation. The study reveals that overall TB notification rates in India dipped significantly during the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic at all-India level. Also, the share of public notification in total TB notification in the country suffered a setback during the pandemic. Select states recorded public notification shares lower than both all-India level shares during COVID-19 and respective state level shares pre-COVID-19. The government should implement stricter surveillance and ensure greater inclusiveness of the national TB program particularly in the post-pandemic situation to prevent the existing burden of TB from taking a heavier toll on the economy.