New Delhi : Amid a surge in covid-19 cases, scientists from India’s National covid-19 Task Force have recommended that the government adopt a strategy of identifying hotspots and clusters and ramp up community-level testing and contact tracing instead of relying solely on testing hospital cases.
Scientists believe that current testing strategy, which focuses on symptomatic patients in hospitals, is inadequate, with only 100 tests per million conducted.
At last week’s task force meeting, leading epidemiologists said increase community-based testing in areas with high case counts, emphasizing need to detect clusters and hotspots. They highlighted low testing rates in states such as West Bengal (900), Madhya Pradesh (781), Goa (548), Uttarakhand (400), and Jharkhand (400) and called for scaling up testing efforts.
“The government is directing states/UTs to increase testing and genome sequencing. But what is its objective? The objective is to detect the infection in the community and isolate or quarantine the individual. For both things, we don’t have any community-level measures. What is being done right now is that we are tracking the third stage—which is hospitalization. So, basically, there is no community-level strategy,” an epidemiologist with the government said, requesting anonymity.
India conducts an average of 150,000-175,000 covid tests a day, with a significant portion being done in Bihar (approximately 40,000 tests) and Uttar Pradesh (approx. 35,000 tests). The country reported 5,880 new cases on Monday based on 85,076 tests conducted in the past 24 hours.
Amid covid surge, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya inspected covid preparedness mock drills at Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in New Delhi, with states and Union Territories conducting similar drills at hospitals nationwide.
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