A senior official of the World Health Organisation on Tuesday said India has a low testing rate when compared to some of the cou...
The Chief Scientist of WHO, Soumya Swaminathan, in an interactive session through video conference said,as of now about 28 vaccine candidates for Covid-19 are under clinical trial of which five are entering Phase-II and over 150 candidates are in pre-clinical trials across the globe.
"India as a whole, the
testing rates are much lower compared to some of the countries, who have done well like Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan.
Even the United States is testing a huge number of people. So we need to have some benchmark and every public health department needs to have benchmarks on what is the rate of testing per lakh or per million, what is the test positivity rate," she said.
Without adequate number of tests, fighting the virus is like "fighting fire blindfolded," she pointed out.
According to Swaminathan, the number of tests being conducted is not adequate if the Covid-19 test positivity rate is abovefive per cent.
Governments need to constantly monitor the availability of beds, quarantine facilities, ICUs and oxygen supplies in district hospitals.
"So there is a set of 8 to 10 indicators that the government needs to keep a close watch on. And you can ramp up or ramp down based on what you are seeing on the ground," she said.
Observing that the scientists' community was still studying the body's immune response to coronavirus and the next 12 months were crucial to put in place the public health and social measures, she said the virus has spread to every country in the world and "established community transmission".
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