India tests 24 people for 1 coronavirus positive case, can't say we are testing less: ICMR

Addressing a press conference here, ICMR's Chief Scientist Raman Gangakhedkar said that the ratio of tests and population of the country cannot be a defining criteria for reaching at a conclusion that less tests are taking place.

"In Japan, 11.7 persons are tested, to detect one positive case, which is highest in foreign countries. In Italy, 6.7 people are tested to find one positive case, in the US it's 5.3 and in the UK it's 3.4. Here in India, we do 24 tests for one positive case," he said, adding "of these 23 tests negative, but still we conduct tests on them".

"Our population is over 130 crores but everyone is not vulnerable that's why we have divided the country in different zones. There are many districts where no case has been reported. If we consider their population as a base, that will be misleading."

Joint Secretary, Health, Lav Agarwal, who was also present at the press conference, said that concluding whether the government is conducting less or more tests on the ratio proportion of population is not correct.

"A particular data can be interpreted in many ways. Our effort is to detect every single positive case. For that, there is properly defined criteria," he said.

"If there is just one positive case among 24 people, it is a clear indication that the government, through its advance actions, has been successful to some extent in containing the disease. It is not about the absolute number of testing which will define criteria for saying that we are testing less, the most important thing is what overall output we are getting by our containment measures along with testing.

"Our priority is to test every single person falling in the category defined by the Health Ministry and all Severe Acute Respiratory Illness (SARI) and Influenza Like Illness (ILI) patients. We are conducting tests for people falling in these categories even in areas where no case has been reported. This will help to detect the virus transmission, if any, even in those areas. Therefore we are working as per the defined procedure in order to monitor our containment strategy and it is working fine," Agarwal elaborated.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had earlier accused the Centre for conducting less tests than required. "India delayed the purchase of testing kits & is now critically short of them. With just 149 tests per million Indians, we are now in the company of Laos (157), Niger (182) & Honduras (162). Mass testing is the key to fighting the virus. At present we are nowhere in the game," he said in a tweet.