Dangers of COVID-19 continues to lurk even if relaxations to the lockdown period continue to be given to keep the wheels of the economy and daily lives running. “We are seeing cases spiking up everyday and it is not surprising. We have to further enhance our testing capacity to understand which way the virus is going even if 70-80% infected persons are asymptomatic carriers because they are going to spread the disease. So, self-discipline is the key and we have to continue to maintain personal hygiene and social distancing,” insists CSIR-Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) Director Rakesh Mishra on Thursday.
“For a variety of reasons, perhaps even due to our genetic disposition and maybe due to exposure to other such viruses earlier, we seem to have a large percentage of asymptomatic patients. These carriers could infect the vulnerable like the elderly and those with co-morbidities so within our capacities, we need to go for more testing. Only then can we can understand the virus spread better because there is no valid proof single drug available and a vaccine is several months away in most optimistic assessment,” he asserted, in an exclusive interaction.
The issues related to the rapid testing kits had put brake to the plans for mass testing for sometime but there are encouraging signs of new antigen testing kits coming into play and these could help increase the testing numbers. “We need to keep the serious illness cases down considering our hospitals capacity to take care of them. We have been able to manage it well so far, but to ensure such cases don't spring up more we need to know the carriers even if asymptomatic, so that they can be isolated and quarantined for the mandatory 14 days before they spread to others or before they turn seriously ill,” he maintained.
Urgency of testing is there because “transmission is happening fast,” he said. “We can understand the anxiety of the governments to let the economy move and people cannot be put under lockdown indefinitely because of the revenues and incomes, however, the way forward is to ramp up testing between one to five lakh a day which the Central Government is seriously considering in next few days,” says the director.
Mass testing for the Coronavirus on the susceptible carriers would give precise data for epidemiologists and others to have some idea about the peaks, trough or flattening of the virus graph across the country. “We are thinking the virus would peak in June before flattening towards August,” feels Dr. Mishra.
