(The Editor's Pick is a new newsletter from The Hindu that provides a snapshot of the most important stories from today's edition of our newspaper, along with a note from our top editors on why we chose to give prominence to these stories.)
India's total reported cases of COVID-19 has crossed the 4 million mark, making it the third country in the world to do so after the U.S. and Brazil. But while other countries have peaked in terms of the number of daily cases, India continues to climb. Over 80,000 cases have been reported on each of the past three days, the highest daily case load for any country so far. The primary reason for this high daily case load is that the number of tests went up steeply. India tested over 11 lakh people daily in the last two days, with a positivity rate of 7.5%. However, of the nearly 4.7 crore tests that India has done so far, only 38.65% is the accurate RT-PCR one. The rest are the faster but error-prone antigen tests. Antigen tests can give false negatives as much as 50% of the time, but States such as Delhi and Karnataka have ramped up Rapid Antigen Detection Tests while not holding as many RTPCR tests as they have the capacity for. Meanwhile, seroprevalence surveys in places like Delhi and Mumbai have shown that the number of COVID-19 cases are much higher than reported. The landmark figure of 4 million that has been crossed, along with the possibility that the real numbers could be much higher, is what makes this story important. |
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