“We are quite concerned about the testing ratio in Telangana and have asked them to ramp up testing at the earliest,” a top central official confirmed to ET. A central representative called up Telangana chief secretary on Wednesday to express concern. It has become the second state after West Bengal where the Centre has asked for more tests. Empowered groups tracking disease testing and surveillance also have taken up the matter with the state government. An inter-ministerial central team which visited Telangana too alerted the state’s medical fraternity on low testing.
Telangana has not released many testing data after April 29, but available data is not very promising. The state had tested 19,278 persons and confirmed 1,096 cases on April 29, according to the web portal covid19india.org. In the last one week, the number of new infections has grown by an average of 1% per day and 29 out of every 1 million tested positive for the virus, as per data on the portal.
The apprehensions is that the low numbers may be because of insufficient testing as the data shows that for every 1 million, only 518 were tested. In comparison, neighbouring Andhra has 1,777 confirmed cases and has done 1.41 lakh tests as on Wednesday. Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have registered up to 1.74 lakh and 83,000 tests, respectively. Telangana figure compares better only with West Bengal which has a test per million population figure of 285.
