Only exit strategy from coronavirus: Rapidly increase testing

India needs to test at least one million people before any reasonable conclusion could be drawn in regard to the spread of the coronavirus disease and thereby reduce the risk of economic and social meltdown.

This was the recommendation from new research done by scientists from the ACALM Study Unit, UK --- testing rapidly is the only way life can return to normal. The research, led by Dr Rahul Potluri, founder of the ACALM study unit, studied the pattern in the top 50 countries with the most number of COVID-19 cases in the world, in relation to the number of tests performed.

Dr Rahul Potluri, Founder of the ACALM Study Unit and Big Data researcher, said: "Different COVID-19 case and death rates have been reported globally and prediction models have been undertaken based on these figures.

However, the basis for any case is a diagnostic test and you cannot have projected prediction models without a common denominator - which is the number of tests performed."The study projected three models on how COVID-19 might pan out. One, according to each country's current testing rate per case/death, the second, adjusted for the countries that have performed at least 100000 tests and the third, adjusting for South Korea which has largely managed to contain the number of cases and deaths. The projections for number of deaths vary significantly according to each of the model but Dr Potluri says:

"We found that countries with the highest testing rates per population have the lowest death rates. It is only by continued testing on a large scale that we will know if the increasing number of patients who are seriously unwell are the tip of the iceberg or not. This information is the only way which will enable us to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. In our study, countries that have tested more than 1% of the population had lower death rates but in a country like India, this equates to 15 million tests which may not be feasible so at least one million tests are needed. The sooner it's done, the better for India, given its population at risk and geographical spread."

According to Dr Potluri, rolling out large-scale testing would help understand the extent of the virus spread.

This would not only help plan healthcare services, identify hotspots and step up isolation/quarantine measures but also enable protecting the vulnerable group while bringing immune people back to work, an essential step to go back to business as usual.

COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China on 31st December 2019. However, previously studied strains of the coronavirus cause widespread non-serious diseases such as common cold. "Given that there is no community immunity and vaccination for COVID-19, without widespread testing we will not know if this is worse than something like influenza from which up to half a million die worldwide annually in spite of vaccination," adds Dr Potluri.