Priyanka Gandhi Vadra appeals people to raise voice for more testing

“As we progress to the second phase of the 21 day lockdown, I think it’s very important that all of us to understand how crucial it is for India to increase its rate of testing”, Ms Priyanka said in a video message in twitter.

“Testing is only enabling us to determine who has Coronavirus. It also gives us extremely valuble information about the severity of the decease, decease clusters and areas that need to be immediately isolated”, she added.

The Congress general secretary’s remarks came amid India witnessed fresh cases of COVID-19 and total number of cases crossed 4000 and death toll stands at 109.

“Looking at the trajectory of the pandemic in Italy and South Korea, both of which have similar size population, we find, while Italy failed to conduct large number of tests, South Korea tested thousands of people in every million”, Ms Priyanka said and added, “this has tremendously in their effort to halt the pandemic and resulted in the spread of COVID-19 being controlled in their country.”

She further said, “unfortunately, when look at the existing data shows, the rate of testing in our country, it is nowhere near where it should be”.

The Congress leader said reports of the community transmission of the virus has now started coming in and the next two weeks will determine our future.

“If testing is not exponentially ramped up, we will be wasting precious time in the fight to save the life. We just cannot afford to lose even a single day, consider the one statistic, only 5 per cent of our population, is over 60 million people, that is larger than whole of Italy and larger than whole of south Korea”, she added.

She pointed out that even if one per cent of India’s population, is severely affected by the COVID-19, that means more than 13 million patients.

“Massively increase testing now”, she appealed.