COVID-19 Test Only For Selected Persons
A suspected case of coronavirus was turned back by RML hospital because he had no history of foreign travel and nor was in contact with a coronavirus patient. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has directed the hospitals to test those selected cases.
ICMR guidelines for coronavirus testing
The government body said that all the people with viral symptoms need not to be tested for COVID-19 because there had been on “community transmission” in India. “Community transmission” is a case where the source of a disease remains obscure.
Special Secretary in the Union Health Ministry, Sanjeev Kumar, said that the country is utilizing only 10% of its total capacity to test COVID-19. He further said that the coronavirus test is free and that the country has a much higher capacity but it was utilizing only 10% of it. Also, 80 lakh masks and safety equipment had been bought for health workers.
Experts criticized the approach
Ramanan Lakshminarayan, founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) criticized the approach saying that the people would spread the disease, if they didn’t know that they were infected. He said that the country was capable in both public and private but the question was that whether the country was deploying that capacity.
The government said that 10,000 tests could be performed daily utilizing 1 lack kits distributed across many centres. But the government should conduct tens of thousands of tests daily before the situation goes out of control.
Source: https://bit.ly/2U99afL