Does lower testing in capital hint at lowering of guard?

NEWDELHI: Testing for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in Delhi appears to have dropped from its peak levels, raising questions about whether the Capital is lowering its guard too soon in its efforts to contain the pandemic, after becoming the first major hot spot in the country to successfully rein in the outbreak last month.

Delhi conducted 21,660 daily tests at an average for the week ending July 9, what has been the city’s highest recorded rate of testing till date. Since then, this number has dropped to 18,491 in the past week — down by around 15%. In the same period, the national average of daily tests has increased from 246,677 a day on July to 700,860 — up by around 184%.

The government attributes this dip to factors such as inclement weather and public holidays.

“The number of tests done on some days is lower. This is mainly because people do not come to the dispensaries or hospitals. For example, yesterday it was raining for most of the day and people did not come. Or, there were holidays like Rakshabandhan or Eid during which people do not want to step out. We are prepared, no one is refused a test if they need it,” said Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain.

Indeed, Delhi’s deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, in an interview to HT on July 1, said the city was heading to 40,000 tests a day. “This is the benefit of rapid testing — you can do it at a large scale. You cannot scale up RT-PCR to that level. We are moving towards 40,000 tests a day. And, the day we do that, it is possible that 4,000 people will test positive, I am prepared for that,” he said. Delhi had started scaling up the tests mid-june after the intervention by Centre. In the first week of June, Delhi was testing 5,500 samples a day.

Instead of scaling up, however, the data suggests that Delhi’s testing number is dipping.

Daily testing in the rest of the country has touched at an alltime high, particularly since Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)’S decision to set a target of testing a million samples a day. HT reported on Friday that the national scale-up of testing appears set to meet the target in 12 days.

To be sure, Delhi has consistently had one of the highest testing rates in the country. The city has conducted over 63,000 tests per million residents against the national average of 20,778.

The Capital was the first major hot spot in the country to have successfully reined in the outbreak last month. At the end of June, the city was reporting over 3,400 cases every day at an average, which has since dropped to 1,100 as of last week. “Scaling down testing is not an option for Delhi as the cases remain high. For testing to be scaled down, you should have a positivity rate of 5% or below for a prolonged period of time,” says Dr Lalit Kant, former head, epidemiology and communicable diseases, ICMR.