India’s testing rates with the rest of the world, compared
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) confirmed 484 positive COVID-19 cases in India as of Tuesday, 24th March. Roughly 300 of those have been reported in the last four days.
South Korea, the only country other than China to have successfully flattened the curve of the number of new cases reported each day, has outlined mass testing, contact tracing, and isolation as the way forward. So far, India has tested 20,864 samples for the novel coronavirus. As the pandemic accelerates in India, we compare India’s number of tests with other countries at a similar stage of the pandemic.
The trajectories of Canada and Brazil are fairly similar to India. Both countries recorded their 400th case last week. However, Brazil reached this number with 45000 tests, while Canada had carried out 25000 tests till 15th March. Since then, Canada and Brazil have confirmed 1584 and 1891 cases each. Both countries have been testing higher numbers than India, and have better healthcare structures.
India’s low testing numbers and high population density throw up another problem — tests performed per million people are extremely low. Based on the most recent data, India is conducting 10.4 tests per million people, one of the lowest testing rates in the world.
The government is making efforts to increase testing, with Pune-based Mylab getting commercial approval for its COVID-19 testing kits. However, while new testing kits may reduce the time taken in getting results, no significant increase can come about until India relaxes its testing criteria. Currently, India is testing only foreign-returned individuals who are symptomatic, their symptomatic contacts and symptomatic healthcare workers. The government expanded this to include all hospitalised patients with SARI and asymptomatic direct and high-risk contacts of a confirmed case. Canada in comparison has been testing the aforementioned and all individuals deemed at high-risk for COVID-19.
Due to the generalised nature of symptoms and a large number of asymptomatic people, the true number of positive cases is hard to ascertain. However, as a general trend, countries that conduct more tests report a higher number of cases. For India, this means that the actual number of cases remains grossly underreported.
