Cannot allow COVID-19 testing for confidence building: Centre

The Centre on Friday made it clear that allowing COVID-19 tests purely for confidence building might not be the right strategy, amid calls for large-scale testing for infection that has claimed over 80 lives across the country.

“Testing is done as per a process and as per sampling guidelines. It might not be the right strategy to allow testing for confidence building alone, particularly at a time when testing kits are limited,” Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry told reporters here.

Several healthcare experts have claimed that India was not testing enough, which could be a reason for the low number of infections in the country.

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), more than 66,000 samples had been tested till Friday for COVID-19 by state-run laboratories.

On Thursday, national laboratories across the country – 130 labs – carried out tests on 8,345 samples, the highest so far on a single day.

“As per the guidelines, we are carrying out tests in areas that have been identified as hotspots. If needed we sill revise the sampling criteria. But there has been no decision so far,” Aggarwal said.

Meanwhile, the ICMR has allowed faster and cheaper antibody tests to check for COVID-19 in hotspots such as Nizamuddin which have reported large number of infections.

“We had a meeting on Thursday to finalise guidelines for using rapid diagnostic tests and we hope by tomorrow (Saturday), we can release these guidelines. Primary purpose of these guidelines would be how to deploy these tests in high-risk areas, low risk areas, hotspot areas and non-hotspot areas,” Manoj Murhekar, Director, National Institute of Epidemiology told reporters here.