Coronavirus: ICMR's sero-survey draws flak for hiding information

The Indian Council of Medical Research's new serological survey report comes under heavy criticism from a group of doctors, who accuse the council of hiding crucial data and selectively disclosing information to present a misleading picture about coronavirus in India.

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Even if one takes the COVID-19 figures shared by ICMR into account, there may be thousands of COVID-19 cases missed by the official reporting system, said doctors from the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum.

Earlier this month, the Centre released few findings of the first part of the ICMR's serological survey that was meant to find out whether novel coronavirus-2019 was spreading silently within the community.

Carried out on people from 60 districts, the survey looked for the COVID-19 antibodies in blood samples of 400 randomly selected individuals from each district. A second part of the survey in 11 hotspot cities are currently underway.

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While ICMR didn't publish the complete survey results, few outcomes have been made public by the government last week.

Two such findings were 0.73% prevalence of COVID-19 in these districts that also have a fatality rate of 0.08%.

"The presented data seeks more to hide the reality than reveal it," said the PMSF statement.

The doctors argued that if the prevalence of 0.73% was extrapolated to the entire population (of these districts), it would give a figure of nearly one crore cases as of April 30, while the actual number of cases recorded till then was 33,050.
Likewise, the COVID-19 fatalities would have been in the range of nearly 8,000 cases but the actual number of deaths recorded till then was 1,074.

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The government also shared two graphs to claim that India is having a prevalence of 20.77 cases and 0.59 deaths per lakh population respectively, which is among the lowest in a select group of countries.

"The problem however is that there is no mention of the samples tested per lakh population by each country. India till date continues to have one of the lowest COVID-19 testing rates in the world. Such claims are therefore redundant for policy formulation," they said.

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The doctors argued that the government had released such "fallacious" data to deny the existence of community transmission in India.

However, independent doctors, medical researchers, state government officials and several studies -including two by ICMR - had shown that the epidemic moved from local to community transmission in India several weeks ago.