Hasibul Nisha, 35, from Dwarka in New Delhi, has been suffering from a dry cough, cold and fever for six days. Her family is worried it might be COVID-19, which has affected more than 200,000 people globally and killed more than 8,000, and is slowly spreading in India. They said they visited three nearby private hospitals in Moti Bagh for tests but were turned away
Nisha’s daughter, Zareena Sheikh, has kept abreast with all COVID-19 advisories and updates and said she believes her mother has similar symptoms. “The doctor keeps giving paracetamol tablets to my mother…The hospitals were really crowded and the doctors said that this is not how checking [for COVID-19] will be done,” Sheikh said
Nisha has no recent history of travel to any affected country and has not been in contact with any confirmed COVID-19 patient that could qualify her for free testing. If Nisha has COVID-19, it could mean community transmission, of which there is no evidence, Indian health authorities insisted once again at a press conference on March 19
Only someone who has symptoms of the disease, such as a cough, fever and breathlessness, can get tested under India’s COVID-19 testing guidelines, if they fulfil one of these conditions: they should have traveled to an affected country and/or had contact with a confirmed case
Until now, India has tested 12,426 people–nearly 9.2 tests per million people. By contrast, Italy had tested 165,541 people until March 18, 2020, or 2,740.75 tests per million. South Korea, which has been able to stabilise the spread of the disease, with a low fatality rate of 0.9%, had tested 295,647 people until March 18, 2020–5,729.6 per million–and is continuing to mass test 20,000 people every day, for free. The UK is testing about 1,500 cases daily–846.7 per million people–and is planning to ramp this up to 10,000.
“Test, test, test” is the message that World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gave to all countries on March 16, 2020.
“We need to be doing more testing, we have a very restrictive testing criterion right now… and these [testing] numbers are too low,” said Bhan.
Source : IndiaSpend
