CHANDIGARH: As the country braces for a possible Covid-19 fourth wave in the coming months, Himachal Pradesh seems to have dropped its guard if the number of tests conducted in the hill state is an indicator.
While the central government has been emphasising on continuing the five-fold strategy of -- Test, track, treat, vaccination and Covid-appropriate behaviour --to prevent the resurgence of cases -- the hill state has conducted just 15,355 tests from April 1-10, making it 1,535 tests per day on average.
The state crossed the mark of 2,000 tests only once on April 4 when 2,372 tests were done.
The figure remained below 1,000 on 2 days, with the lowest count of 267 on April 10.
Himachal not only tested less but also relied heavily on rapid antigen testing (RAT) -a quicker testing method with a low accuracy rate— in comparison to reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) -a gold standard in the diagnosis of Covid-19.
Results of conventional RTPCR – the most accurate test—are processed in 24 hours while rapid antigen tests give results in 15 minutes with an accuracy of about 70% and having the possibility of giving false negatives.
Barring Una, where RTPCR accounted for 60% of total tests conducted in April 4-10, the proportion of rapid tests was higher than the conventional method of testing.
As per the weekly report compiled by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), 91% of the tests during the past week were done using RAT in Hamirpur while the rapid testing method accounted for 85% of total tests in Kinnaur, 83% each in Chamba and Lahaul and Spiti, 80% in Bilaspur, 71% in Mandi, 64% in Kangra, 58% in Solan and 51% in Shimla.
Out of these districts, Mandi, Shimla, Kangra, Chamba, Kinnaur, Solan and Hamirpur had a weekly positivity rate higher than the national average of 0.2%.
Performance of Haryana, Punjab not impressive
The neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana managed to conduct more tests in comparison to Himachal Pradesh, but the performance of these two states was far from impressive.
In April 1-10, as many as 66,921 tests -6,692 tests per day on average were conducted in Haryana while health authorities tested 95,567 samples -9,556 tests per day--in Punjab.
In Haryana, 74% of the samples in Hisar were examined using the rapid testing method, 62% in Fatehabad, 61% in Mahendragarh and 57% in Bhiwani. In Punjab’s four districts -Faridkot (62%), Muktsar (59%), Hoshiarpur (53%) and Mohali (52%), -the RAT method was used more than RT-PCR.
