A top health official from Telangana on Wednesday advised residents to wear masks even inside homes while warning them about the possibility of spreading the coronavirus infection indoors, The News Minute reported.

“If you return home from outside and remove your mask, there is a possibility of infecting your family members and they could lose their lives,” the state’s Public Health Director G Srinivasa Rao said in a video message.

Rao said that the virus was airborne and could be transmitted at a very fast rate inside homes. “If someone in a family is infected, then it is just taking a few hours, or at most a day or two for others in the family also to get infected by Covid-19, especially in closed settings of homes,” he said, according to the Deccan Chronicle.

He said the situation was “extremely dangerous” and added that the government had not yet imposed a lockdown only because it wanted to ensure people’s livelihoods were not affected.

Rao’s comment came as Telangana, like most other states in the country, continued to report a high number of coronavirus cases. On Wednesday 2,157 of the samples tested were found to be positive. On Tuesday, 3,052 people had tested positive.

Rao warned that the situation was going to be the same for the “next four to six weeks”, according to The News Minute.

“If the situation continues like this, our state will also turn into a Maharashtra,” he said. “Already some people are struggling to find beds. If this rate of infection continues, even if the government makes necessary arrangements, there is a possibility of shortage of beds.”