New Delhi: Refuting all the charges that India is not conducting enough tests when the country is witnessing a huge spike in COVID-19 cases, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has on Thursday said that it's wouldn't be right to say that we are not conducting enough testing.
However, India on Thursday reported total 12,759 confirmed cases, out of which 10,824 are active cases, 1,515 have recovered and 420 deaths. In the last 24 hours, 826 new cases and 28 deaths have been reported.
"In India, the government is carrying out 24 tests for one positive case, which means that there are lesser number of infected people in the country in comparison to other foreign countries as Japan has tested 11.7 people per one positive," said ICMR's Raman Gangakhedkar.
The ICMR's chief scientist further said that Italy got one positive case after testing 6.7 samples, while in US its 5.3 tests for one confirmed COVID-19 cases and in UK it's 3.4 tests for one positive case.
"Taking their population base into consideration, it is difficult to comment about our testing rate. Also, we have a huge population and not all people belong to vulnerable groups. Hence, can't say our testing ratio is low," Gangakhedkar said, adding that we are also testing patients with severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) and influenza-like illness (ILI) even in places which have not reported any Coronavirus positive case.
On the availability of testing kits, the ICMR official said, "We have received 5 lakh Antibody Rapid testing kits from China, which will be used for surveillance in hotspot and potential hotspot areas. The antibody testing kits are meant for testing the presence of antibodies in the human body. During the testing, if the presence of IgM antibodies is found in the body, it means a new virus has entered into the body and if the presence of IgG antibodies are noticed, it means the virus is not new."
Rejecting all the reports about the poor quality of testing kits, the IMCR official said, "Since the 'sensitivity and specificity' of antibody testing kits are lesser, so it varies between 74 per cent to 80 per cent. The rapid testing kits are not used for diagnostic purposes, it's used just to understand the trend of spread of the virus in any particular area."
However, the ICMR official said, "So far 2,90,401 samples have been tested and of which 30,043 were tested on Wednesday itself. Out of the tests carried out on Wednesday, 26,331 were done in laboratories under ICMR network and 3,712 in private labs."
Commenting on the testing capacity of ICMR network, Gangakhedkar said, "Working in one shift, more than 42,400 samples can be tested each day. If we work in two shifts, we will be able to test more than 78,200 samples daily."