Thread by @thewire_in

While it took nearly one-and-half months for India to cross 100 cases after the first patient was identified on January 31, it took only four days for the case count to double from 288 to 599 last week.

ICMR casts doubts on its own testing strategy.

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Jacob John, a professor of community medicine at Vellore’s Christian Medical College, said, “I believe the testing of only travel-related cases was a serious error.” | @PriyankaPulla reports.

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@PriyankaPulla By ICMR’s own admission, India had ample capacity to conduct tests for COVID-19, and so a shortage wasn’t the cause for the slow ramp-up.

Another coauthor of the paper, has said previously that ICMR was only using 10% of its testing capacity.

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@PriyankaPulla The conclusion that there was no evidence of community transmission was seemingly based on negative test results from 500 SARI samples – a sample size that other experts have called inadequate for a country of over 1.3 billion people.

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@PriyankaPulla John added that since India delayed such widespread testing, it might now be too late to prevent an exponential rise in cases.

“We may have missed the opportunity of a South Korean-type response, to test and isolate,” he said.
#Coronavirus

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@PriyankaPulla The widespread agreement on the need for aggressive community testing raises the following question: how many more tests has ICMR conducted among community cases since the last time it announced these numbers (826 on March 19)?

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