((The writer is President, CMAAO, HCFI and Past national President IMA))
COVID 19: Symptomatic cases testing or asymptomatic cases testing
People can just call on the helpline numbers given by the Ministry of Health and officials will collect samples of people for testing from their homes
— By Dr KK Aggarwal
Symptomatic cases testing
1. To keep community transmission under check about 1000 sample checks will be done per week
2. Sampling in private labs has been made available.
3. 72 functional labs of the apex medical body conducting tests and another 49 private NABL-accredited labs will soon be operational.
4. He also appealed to all private laboratories to offer COVID-19 diagnosis free of cost.
5. ICMR has asked private labs to do it free (testing or collection?)
6. Private testing will be done only with the referral of a doctor.
7. People can just call on the helpline numbers given by the Ministry of Health and officials will collect samples of people for testing from their homes
8. One million testing kits have been ordered along with more test centres to be added by the end of this week
Let us see the numbers
1. Only symptomatic people are tested
2. For everyone symptomatic we have 50 asymptomatic cases
3. For everyone case with breathless ness we have 4 mild cases with only cough and fever
4. Mean Time to symptoms is 5 days
5. Mean time to breathlessness is 9 days
6. If you close the borders and stop importing the new virus, in 4-6 weeks you will catch all possible symptomatic cases inspite of few asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people cheating.
7. This policy is only successful if your international borders closure policy is successful.
Other policy is test test and test policy of asymptomatic cases
1. You are liberal in testing
2. Advantage is less coronxiety.
3. Negative cases are not quarantined
4. Imagine a negative person quarantined and after 14 days actually gets an infection
5. Test is positive on day one while symptoms appear on day 5.