No scaling down of Covid-19 tests despite low case count, says health department

Despite the Covid-19 spread ebbing to its lowest since last May, health department officials have said that there will be no further scaling down of tests in the district

Despite the Covid-19 spread ebbing to its lowest since last May, health department officials have said that there will be no further scaling down of tests in the district. A minimum of 2,500 tests per day, with 95 percent of them being RT-PCR (Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests, will be conducted daily even if the growth rate of new Covid-19 cases improves further in the coming weeks, officials confirmed on Tuesday.

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Officials also said they have discontinued antigen camps in the district, since rapid diagnostic tests — which are known to yield a larger number of false negatives than RT-PCR ones — have limited efficacy at this stage in the epidemic.

In Gurugram — which is one of Haryana’s worst-hit districts — the daily growth rate of Covid-19 cases is down to 0.5 percent, with the test positivity rate(TPR) hovering just above 1 percent for at least two weeks now. At the height of the epidemic’s third wave in early November, the district’s total caseload was growing by almost 3 percent daily, with daily TPR at almost 25 percent. At that time, the district was conducting at least 6,000 tests per day, with about 80 percent of them being RT-PCR ones.

“We were preferring to use more antigen tests because of limited resources, and because antigen positivity is an important indicator when you are trying to keep up with widespread transmission. Now we are more concerned with treating individual cases, for which the current rate of testing is sufficient,” said Dr. Virender Yadav, chief medical officer(CMO), Gurugram.

“We are expecting new cases to slow down further before March-end, but in terms of tests we will keep conducting at least 2,500 to 3,000 tests every day. We will be able to make RT-PCR tests available more widely now, which is why antigen tests are being deprioritised,” Yadav added.

Presently, official data shows that around 95 percent of all daily tests are RT-PCR in nature. “This is more than the centrally recommended ratio of 80 percent RT-PCR and 20 percent antigen. There is no rule which states that it is mandatory to conduct a certain amount of rapid antigen tests. We started scaling them down in early January itself, but camps were still being organised as a surveillance tool in some areas. They are no longer serving that purpose anymore,” said Dr Jai Prakash Sharma, district surveillance officer, Gurugram.

This is also because there has been a significant drop in the number of walk-in tests at antigen camps organised in localities which until recently were regarded as hot spots for Covid-19.

“In some areas, like Tigra and Patel Nagar, we would see dozens of people come in every day with symptoms. Now there are hardly any walk-ins. Contact tracing has once again become the main route to identify suspected cases,” said Sharma, adding that authorities are being able to trace at least six to seven contacts per positive case, as against just three contacts per case in November.

However, Sharma clarified that contact tracing remains a challenge because people are far more mobile now. “The number of people each positive person interacts with is hard to figure out because everything has mostly opened up. People are meeting others quite freely. But we are doing better at following up with close contacts, which is the important part,” he said.

Despite these changes in their epidemic response, officials also sad it would not be accurate to say that their strategy has changed. They maintained that they are simply adapting the existing guidelines to the changes in the ground reality of the district.

“We have assigned more staffers toward the vaccine roll-out but that has not affected testing. The overall strategy is the same as that directed by the Central government, which is to trace contacts and enable access to tests for people who fall sick. If the ministry issues new guidelines on increasing or reducing tests, or changing the type of tests, we will follow them. The main thing is that our positivity rate remains below five percent,” said Dr Yadav.