Testing times as India tries to keep coronavirus at bay
At this point in time, everyone must be feeling a bit like a fugitive renegade from the mafia: desperate, in hiding, and trying to control mounting panic in the face of a foreboding that, sooner or later, it will get you. The science relating to coronavirus, evolving at supersonic pace at labs around the world, more or less confirms that.
Especially for India: Covid-19 will perhaps inevitably become a permanent member of the rich biodiversity of pathogens we already boast of. The only thing to do is a kind of tense Faustian negotiation. How fast do we let that happen? Can we hold the devil at bay long enough to save potentially thousands of lives in this very season? We do not know.
Officially speaking, India is poised between Stage 1 and Stage 2 of the disease spread: that is, between the primary infected coming in from abroad, and them infecting a second layer of others. But the consolation that we are yet to reach Stage 3 - the virus out there in public, in the community - is only an official one.
We have not tested enough to know for sure. Till Tuesday’s announcement that expanded the onus to private labs, we had only 52 public labs testing.
And they were being used only just above 1 per cent of their daily capacity! In every zone that has already suffered - from Wuhan, to Italy, Iran and the US - it’s the wide gap between officially confirmed cases and full-blown cases that were not tested and designated as such that created the high fatalities.
And as South Korea showed us, even one unknown case at large can bring a country to its knees. In stark contrast to the usual upper-class fear of slums as pathogenic Petri dishes, this is a rich man’s disease now- trickling down from there. We must zero in on those zones, and expand testing to a carefully selected pool aggressively, and forthwith.