Epidemiologists recommend enhanced testing of communities in areas with high case counts New Delhi : Amid a surge in covid-19 cases, scientists from India’s National covid-19 Task Force have recommended that the government adopt a strategy of identifying hotspots and clusters and ramp up community-level testing and contact tracing instead of relying solely on testing hospital cases.
Scientists believe that current testing strategy, which focuses on symptomatic patients in hospitals, is inadequate, with only 100 tests per million conducted.
At last week’s task force meeting, leading epidemiologists said increase community-based testing in areas with high case counts, emphasizing need to detect clusters and hotspots.
They highlighted low testing rates in states such as West Bengal (900), Madhya Pradesh (781), Goa (548), Uttarakhand (400), and Jharkhand (400) and called for scaling up testing efforts. “The government is directing states/UTs to increase testing and genome sequencing.