The government and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said that only one in every 24 samples tested for coronavirus in India is positive. With comparison to the "positivity ratio" of other countries like Japan, Italy, the US and UK, India shows a less number of tests for each confirmed case.

ICMR chief epidemiologist Dr R R Gangakhedkar said that in Japan, one out of 11.7 tests are positive, which is the highest in the world. Italy tests 6.7 persons for one positive test whereas the US tests 5.3 persons and UK tests 3.4.

The statistics offered by the health ministry and ICMR seemed to be a response to Congress functionary Rahul Gandhis remarks on Thursday that India was testing very few people and might be under-reporting the positive cases. He repeated the concerns of few experts who have questioned the testing strategy using the confirmatory RT-PCR. The government had said the strategy has been evolved and testing has also been expanded with an increase in coronavirus cases.

Currently, the testing strategy is covering all the symptomatic cases as well as hospitalized cases of severe acute respiratory illness. Moreover, the government is using rapid antibody tests for investigation in hotspots and also in green zones, which have not reported any positive cases.

Government experts have said that testing should not be spread too thinly but have to pick samples across susceptible sections with observation and tracking on hotspots. Refuting criticism that less number of positive cases reported by India is due to insufficient testing that is resulting in many cases of being missed or not reported.

Health ministry joint secretary, Lav Agarwal said that the number indicates that the advanced action has been taken by the government to contain the outbreak to some extent.

325 districts in India have not reported any coronavirus case till now, according to health ministry. The implementation of containment strategies in few districts that had earlier reported coronavirus cases, have generated positive results.

On Wednesday, the government had divided all of 732 districts of the country in three colour zones – red, white and green as per the rate of growth of coronavirus positive cases.

170 districts were identified as hotspots or ‘red zone’ areas, whereas 207 districts is currently low but can be potential hotspots. They have been classified as ‘non-hotspots’ or white zones. There are green zone districts with no new positive case in last 28 days.

The health ministry had reported a total of 12,759 confirmed cases and the death count has reached 420 on Thursday. 941 new cases and 37 deaths were confirmed in the last 24 hours.

Source: ET Healthworld