With one expert having termed the testing for Covid-19 being carried out in the country as being as good as “flipping a coin”, questions must be raised about the strategy being followed by the Indian Council of Medical Research in exponentially raising the number of tests but mixing results of the more accurate RT-PCR tests with those yielded by rapid antigen tests.

Close to a third of the tests being carried out in the country are of the latter variety and these are said to report false negatives at least half the time. In Delhi, according to one report, nearly two-thirds of the tests were reported to be of the rapid antigen variety.

False negatives reported from such tests could lead to the finding that spread of the disease has been curbed when that may not actually be the case.

In the Philippines, for instance, administration of rapid antigen tests led to a false narrative whereby infected people returned to communities and sparked fresh outbreaks

. While experts say that the rapid antigen test has its uses, and is even considered a competent supplementary strategy, the real problem lies in India mixing up the results of the two kinds of tests to present a composite picture that may not adequately reflect the state of affairs.

Experts say the two sets of results should be reported ~ and studied ~ separately to reach conclusions that would validly help the country arrive at a strategy which is both efficacious and scientifically acceptable.

With the management of Covid-19 having emerged as a measure to assess political and administrative efficiency, it is not surprising that opacity in reporting data should become a major impediment to effective public health measures.

To this day, there is little harmony in the strategies adopted by different state governments in India, and not even between states administered by the same political party, which suggests that the Union government may have allowed matters to slip quite substantially from its control.

A study of the Covid management protocols adopted by different states ~ in the public domain and easily accessible ~ would reveal that sometimes even contiguous states have widely contrasting rules.

This suggests that each state is taking such decisions as its leader deems politically expedient; these may sometimes even be unreasonably restrictive because politicians have convinced themselves that adoption of harsh measures displays decisiveness.

While implementation of public health measures must be left to those on the ground, the creation of a national strategy must fall within the province of a nodal authority.

If we permit the use of a cricketing analogy, this is one contest from which the Union Health Minister cannot retire hurt; nor one where he can claim that states and local bodies must provide concussion substitutes.