Test, test, test, and test
Anyone who wishes to get tested should be able to do so
India’s dashboard showed 216,677 cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and 6,005 deaths on Wednesday night. The corresponding numbers for Delhi were 23,645 and 606. The number of cases continues to rise — in India and in Delhi. The country added 9,565 cases on Wednesday; the Capital added 1,513. The pandemic is yet to peak here. This should be a time when testing should be fast, wide, and indiscriminate.
We are told that resources, when it comes to testing, are no longer a constraint — that we have the people, reagents, and equipment to test more people, and do so rapidly. We are told that there are techniques such as pooling that can be used, to test many samples all at once and then narrow down on the infected. So, why is it so difficult to get a test? This is true across the country, but especially in Delhi, which recently changed its testing guidelines to say that asymptomatic direct contacts of infected people, including close family members will only be tested if they are high risk — which means they are over a certain age, or have co-morbidities. They will be asked to go into quarantine, but not tested. While some other states, including Maharashtra, which has the most cases in India, allow tests for all asymptomatic direct contacts, they have their own filters that make this difficult. For instance, someone with a cough, but who isn’t in a containment zone, or hasn’t been exposed to an infected person, or hasn’t travelled overseas, will have to jump through hoops to get tested anywhere in India, even in a private laboratory. With positivity rates continuing to remain the same or even rising in many states — this is the proportion of people testing positive to the number of tests done — it’s hard to believe that states are not making testing difficult just to keep their numbers down, and do well in some irrelevant and imaginary contest. Even Kerala, whose testing statistics are dismal, is no exception to this.
It is time for the Indian Council for Medical Research to relax testing guidelines, and standardise them across India to ensure that anyone who has the symptoms, or who has had contact with an infected person, or who is in the most-vulnerable group (senior citizens and those with other ailments) can get tested — and that is in the first phase. In the second phase, anyone who wants to get a test — young, old, symptomatic, asymptomatic — should be able to get a test; and the government should pay for those who can’t afford to pay for it themselves. Three months into a pandemic’s run in India, and after 68 days of lockdown, it isn’t acceptable to say the country doesn’t have testing resources.