Covid-19 testing drops even as daily cases rise to three-month high

Despite India’s daily Covid-19 cases touching a three-month high with 7,240 cases on Thursday, laboratory testing of the viral infection has not gained momentum.

Testing volumes have not grown much nationally, though individual states show some improvement.

An analysis of data from independent tracker covid19bharat.org shows that the national 7-day moving average number of tests has dropped 15.4 per cent from around 443,471 on May 15 to 375,145 on June 7 (see chart 1).

There had been more than four times that number — as many as 1.7 million tests daily — in the early part of the year when cases had risen because of the Omicron variant. The states that are recording among the highest numbers are also the ones that have proactively stepped up testing even as the national testing numbers decline.

Maharashtra and Kerala have higher testing than was seen in mid-May (see chart 2).

Demand for home-testing through rapid antigen test (RAT) kits, however, is on the rise.

“We have seen an increase in demand for CoviSelf by 30-40 per cent in India in the last one month. We saw an uptick in demand from North around mid-May but now we are witnessing a rise in demand from West and South. We are the largest manufacturer of RAT kits with the capacity to produce 1.5 million test kits per day,” said Hasmukh Rawal of Pune-based Mylab Discovery Solutions.

Many home tests are not reported officially. All such kits are linked to a mobile application, which is linked to the back-end secure server of the Indian Council of Medical Research where any positive test data is captured and stored. However, since the test results are fairly easy to interpret, many often do not use the mobile application, and thus their results are not captured in the national database.

A Mumbai civic body official admitted that the actual Covid-19 positive numbers would be much higher than what are being captured through laboratory testing.

Private diagnostic labs say that they have seen some rise in demand for Covid-19 testing, but it is not significant.

“It has not reached the peak yet and it is not as high as the second or third wave. In comparison with Delta or Omicron, the volumes have not grown because of excessive home testing options that are available. Moreover, people are not willing to do the test themselves. We are observing a substantial increase in positive cases, especially in Mumbai. But most testing is happening via RATs where we are witnessing low to moderate symptoms,” said Ameera Shah, MD, Metropolis Healthcare.

Another large national diagnostic player, SRL, too said that testing has gone up in pockets — Kerala, Mumbai, some parts of Punjab. “As such, there is a 20 per cent rise in demand for PCR tests, but these are concentrated in pockets. At present, we are not collecting any government samples for processing,” said Anand K, CEO, SRL Diagnostics.

Anand added that the test positivity rate in laboratory settings is high — around 7-8 per cent — as mostly symptomatic cases are coming for tests.

Health secy writes to states

The Union health secretary has written to states to step up vigil and take pre-emptive actions, if necessary, to contain any rapid spread of Covid-19 infections. Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said in his letter that in the week ending June 8,4,207 average daily new cases were reported, compared to 2,663 cases in the week ending June 1.

The health ministry has asked states to ensure a high level of testing, and monitor average daily tests per million as well as share of RT-PCR in the overall tests.

The ministry has asked states to ensure Covid-19 appropriate behaviour among people, monitor clusters of Covid-19 cases and influenza-like illnesses, as well as genomic sequencing of samples from international passengers and clusters of cases.