Underreporting of cases can be misleading

India has more than 2.5 lakhs cases of coronavirus. It has certainly increased its COVID testing to about 1.42 lakh a day. But as the Test Positivity Rate (TPR) is now rising, the number of tests should also increase to nearly half a million per day.

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), once the TPR goes beyond 10%, the testing needs to be increased.

Delhi’s TPR was 37.82%  on Saturday and more tests should have been conducted. Gujarat has a TPR of 13.47%, and Vadodara’s TPR is approx 22% (as per the data of the last 15 days) while for Maharashtra it is 23.12%. The TPR in Mumbai is over 40%.

Gujarat, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Telangana have recorded a TPR above the national average of 8.5 %

Lesser tests would conclude lesser positive cases which would show good results in terms of cases and their fatalities. Few states are tweaking the number of COVID deaths, but the IMCR and the government are constantly pushing to increase the capacity for cremation, which means the number of deaths can only be tweaked to a certain extent.

The more the number of tests will be conducted, the faster the cases would be detected and treated, which would decrease the fatalities. Gujarat’s fatality rate is 19.08 million, and Ahmedabad’s fatality rate of 40 per million. The fatality rate is the proportion of people who die from a specified disease among all individuals diagnosed with the disease over a certain period of time.

Gujarat also has a high mortality rate and its difficult to understand why the deaths are high. The death counts include multiple reasons like comorbidity, high-risk factors, late detection and delayed reporting. Director of the Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH), Dr Dileep Mavalankar cited that the high mortality rate in Ahmedabad can be because of dense population and the high number of population being obese, diabetic, have hypertension and anaemia.

As of now, proper implementation of the health care system should be the focus and providing care to every patient is the need of the hour.