Thread by @thekaipullai

Some people are saying, We are testing enough. A lot of people are questioning that and are, we are not testing enough.

They are throwing a lot of graphs and models at us

What nobody talks about, are the practical difficulties of mass testing in a country with a billion people

First aspect is the cost. 70% of India, lives on less than Rs 500 a day. Of this 70%, 90% are daily wagers whose livelihood has been shut down for over a month.

Who will pay for the tests, that cost Rs 5000? How much can you subsidize?

Second, India is a country, whose middle name is Panic. When the PM called a Janata Curfew, half of us went to the nearest station to catch a train back home. And that was just one example

If we open up testing to everyone, I am sure 75% of us will land up at the nearest centre

Not because we have it, but because we want to convince ourselves that we don't. We are a country that goes to a doctor for a slight headache, imagine what we will do in this scenario?

How to manage the crowd? And what if the Virus starts spreading at the testing centres?

India's next Superspreaders will come, from the very place they went to reassure themselves tht they didn't have the virus.

What will you do then? Bemoan the lack of Ventilators and Hospital beds?

And if testing centres don't work, how will you implement mass testing?

Please don't give me examples of South Korea, New Zealand, Lichtenstein and other such countries. More people travel on Indian trains, than the population of these countries.

In Car testing won't work in a Country, where 90% of the people don't have cars.

And how will in-house testing work, in a country that has 300 million households? Assuming, even 1 Lakh houses a day are tested, it will take 8 years to test all of our households

Are you ready for a 8 year lockdown?

I respect your argument about more testing.

But how to implement it nicely. Sorry to say, I have not seen a convincing answer to that question.