IHP lights up drawback in reduced testing

By Rathindra Kuruwita

At high rates of transmission, an effective lockdown combined with high rates of testing and isolation could stop an outbreak completely within six to eight weeks, Executive Director of the Institute for Health Policy (IHP), Dr. Ravi Rannan-Eliya told The Island yesterday.

“Two good examples of this are Wuhan in February 2020 and Melbourne in mid-2020. Both effectively got to zero in about 6-8 weeks. However, since Sri Lanka does not have high levels of testing and have in fact reduced testing and tracing and isolation is also not working. I don’t see how a lockdown can work in these conditions,” he said.

Dr. Rannan-Eliya said that lockdowns had completely failed in many developing countries and that the most effective intervention was testing, tracing and isolation. However, the rate of PCR testing had fallen during the lockdown.

“Without aggressive testing, a lockdown is unlikely to work well. I think that it is quite possible that transmission is actually increasing, and this is being hidden by the reduction in testing. Some evidence of this is the fact that reported cases are flat at around 3,000 cases a day, but the test positivity rate has increased substantially,” he said.