Internal Medicine: Open Access
Open Access

COVID-19 and Tuberculosis Control

Digambar Behera^{* *}Correspondence: Digambar Behera, Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, Chandigarh, India, Email:

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Description

There are nearly 54,558,120 confirmed cases of COVID-19 including the 1,320,148 deaths so far as reported to the WHO. Many countries and the societies are impacted by the disease in an unprecedented scale. Many countries implemented lockdowns and the quarantines to curtail the spread of this virus, and a large number of global populations are still under these restrictions. These restrictive measures, such as the physical distancing, and restrictions on the gatherings, and travel, have led to many adverse impacts on the societies, economies, and the health-care delivery systems.

Discussion

All countries of the world are struggling to maintain their health care systems in order to cope under such an extraordinary conditions. In addition to the affecting medical care of various diseases, whether the therapeutic or preventive, COVID-19 has bad prognosis if associated with certain disease conditions such as the cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases (COPD and bronchial asthma), diabetes mellitus, hypertension, chronic kidney diseases, and mainly cancer. However, the association and the effect of COVID-19 vis-a-vis tuberculosis (TB) on each other is not clearly understood and experience on the COVID-19 in TB patients is limited. There are many similarities and differences between these two diseases. Some limited and preliminary observations suggest that the TB infection is likely to increase susceptibility to the SARS-CoV-2, and increases the COVID-19 severity, but this requires the validation in larger studies. If it is so it will have a major impact in the India as one third of its population is infected with the TB. There are some striking similarities between these two. Both can cause major infection-related to the morbidity and mortality. While the COVID-19 had caused about 1.5 million deaths so far over a period of these 8 months, TB was the leading cause of mortality from an infectious disease worldwide in 2018, causing about 1.2 million deaths. The number of new cases of the TB disease globally was nearly about 10 million but the COVID-19 cases have already crossed that figure within 6 months of its origin. COVID-19 pandemic has been disturbed the delivery of the health care in almost all the countries of the world. This has also affected mostly the public health control programs. Because of these lock downs and restrictions in the movement, psychological fear of contacting the disease in the health care facilities, diversion of health care workers for the containment and the management of COVID-19, utilization of diagnostic facilities like the CBNAAT machines for COVID work, conversion of hospitals for care of these patients, financial diversion etc has been created issues in the National TB control/ Elimination Programs to focus on the TB diseases control. Case notification and the other areas of the program to achieve End TB by the year 2025 have suffered. Various ways of overcoming these difficulties will also be discussed.

Conclusion

The impact of COVID-19 on TB control can be examined from the two sides. Patients were either unable to access the medical services due to closures and travel restrictions or hesitated due to concerns about the infection with COVID-19. It might be a positive impact on the less transmission occurring outside the household and a negative impact on the more transmission within the household during the lockdown phase. Meanwhile, the health service providers working in TB experienced lack of both the human resources and laboratory capacity.