In this article for Hindustan Times, Arpit Gupta, assistant professor of finance at NYU Stern School of Business, Anup Malani, professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Pritzker School of Medicine, and Reuben Abraham, CEO, write about how India’s fight against COVID-19 will benefit from random testing of the population by filling information gaps.
Excerpts below:
“Existing methods of measuring the disease’s prevalence are likely to give inaccurate results. India, like most countries, has a shortage of testing kits. As a result, it prioritises the testing of the individuals who have severe symptoms and show up at the hospital. It misses those who have symptoms, but not severe enough to go to the hospital, and those who are asymptomatic — lack of cough, fever or trouble in breathing — but, nonetheless, are carriers who can infect others.
There are good reasons to think that many individuals are asymptomatic, which means that true caseload is under-measured. For example, the city of Vò (Italy) tested all its inhabitants, and found as many as 50% of individuals were asymptomatic. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, 18% of the infected population showed no symptoms, while in Iceland, 50% of those who tested positive were asymptomatic. A recently released report from Maharashtra suggests that 85% of cases in the state were asymptomatic, similar to the recent findings from China, published in The British Medical Journal. They suggest that we will never be able to measure the true prevalence of Covid-19 by testing only high-risk populations.“
Read the full article here.
Note: This work was done by the author/s when they were a part of the IDFC Institute and is republished here with permission.
