India: Experts urge more testing as COVID-19 cases rise

With the number of novel coronavirus cases in India continuing to rise and the death toll climbing to 136 on Tuesday, health experts have called for more testing in the country. “India’s [coronavirus] strategy was conservative and limited to only those persons with a travel history or connected to such individuals. "Unless we test much more, we will never know the actual extent of the problem and understand whether our interventions are adequate or falling short,” said Rao, who is the author of But Do We Care: India's Health System. Since more cases are coming up, it is imperative to scale up testing to understand the actual spread of this infection,” he told Anadolu Agency. India has reported a total of 136 deaths of coronavirus, with around 4,780 confirmed COVID-19 cases across the country as of Tuesday morning. Gagandeep Kang, a clinical scientist who heads the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in India, said “not enough tests are happening.” The ICMR last week also issued an advisory to start rapid antibody-based blood tests for COVID-19 “in areas reporting clusters and in large migration gatherings or evacuee centers.” ICMR Director-General Balram Bhargava wrote to India’s Health Secretary Preeti Sudan asking her to disseminate an advisory in states and union territories to start rapid antibody- based blood tests for COVID-19. Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Washington-based Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy and a lecturer at Princeton University, told Anadolu Agency that while “India has been proactive in tackling the epidemic both by sealing borders and locking down the country, the biggest such exercise in the world,” testing has been slow. Thankfully, going by the numbers in India now, cases are not rising like we have seen exponentially in other countries,” said Dr. D. Bahera, a north India-based pulmonologist.