It is the world’s largest lockdown ever: 1.2 billion Indians have been ordered to stay at home for 21 days. The government has said the ext...
It is the world’s largest lockdown ever: 1.2 billion Indians have been ordered to stay at home for 21 days. The government has said the extreme measure is necessary to break the chain of transmission of the coronavirus, though public health experts point out that all this does is give the country some time to build capacity to fight the virus in the coming months.
One major capacity is the ability to test and detect cases.
Gagandeep Kang, a clinical scientist who heads the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, an autonomous government institute, said that testing was crucial to gauge the extent of community transmission in the country. Community transmission is said to take place when the source of infection for a large number of cases in an area cannot be traced: when individuals pick up the infection without having travelled to countries where the virus is circulating or having been in contact with known confirmed cases.
Testing would also give Indian authorities a sense of the trajectories of transmission. “That will better inform models and allow us to make predictions about where we need to be emphasising stronger responses,” Kang said during a web conference.
But India has so far among the lowest ratios of...
