At 32 per million, India lags behind on testing
NEWDELHI: Nearing a month after the wave of Covid-19 infections began in India, testing in the country is a 60th of that in the UK, a 82th of that in the US, and a 241th of that in South Korea, highlighting an area where India continues to lag.
Although India has opened up testing to private laboratories — 47 of them — in addition to 127 government laboratories, questions remain about the availability of testing kits. On March 28, Dr Navin Dang, who runs Dr Dangs Labs, one of the private laboratories allowed to conduct Covid-19 tests, highlighted this gap.
Worryingly, questions also remain about whether the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has set unrealistic standards for testing kits. According to its guidelines, ICMR allows US FDA approved kits and European Ce-mark kits to be used after due approvals; for other commercial kits, it said that approval would be granted only to those who have a 100% concordance among both true positive and true negative samples (sensitivity and specificity) — a condition that several experts have described as unrealistic and restrictive.
Of the 17 commercial kits sent for approval so far, only four have cleared the parameters.
R Gangekhedkar of ICMR said on Sunday that the capacity utilisation of the body’s network of labs is only 30% — indicating that states can scale up tests. Gangekhedkar
also said there were enough kits to conduct additional tests.
Till March 30, India has conducted 38,442 tests for Covid-19.
That works out to one in around 34,000 people, or roughly 32 in a million being tested. Germany, now the benchmark in testing, is testing 500,000 people a week, according to data analysis website ourworldindata.org. Germany, as of Monday, had nearly 63,000 cases, but managed to keep the number of deaths to 560, a fatality rate of under 0.9.
As of March 29 and March 30 respectively, the UK and the US, both widely criticised for their testing ratios, had tested around 127,737 and 851,578 people — roughly 1,921 per million and 2,600 per million. Dr Aggarwal said countries like Germany and South Korea, which conducted mass tests, don’t adopt complete lockdown strategy like India.
India’s testing protocol for Covid-19 has evolved, but remains restrictive: Until March 20, only symptomatic health care workers treating Covid-19 patients.