COVID-19 testing, timeliness and positivity from ICMR’s laboratory surveillance network in India: Profile of 176 million individuals tested and 188 million tests, March 2020 to January 2021

Abstract

Background The Indian Council of Medical Research set up a pan-national laboratory network to diagnose and monitor Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Based on these data, we describe the epidemiology of the pandemic at national and sub-national levels and the performance of the laboratory network. Methods We included surveillance data for individuals tested and the number of tests from March 2020 to January 2021. We calculated the incidence of COVID-19 by age, gender and state and tests per 100,000 population, the proportion of symptomatic individuals among those tested, the proportion of repeat tests and test positivity. We computed median (Interquartile range—IQR) days needed for selected surveillance activities to describe timeliness. Results The analysis included 176 million individuals and 188 million tests. The overall incidence of COVID-19 was 0.8%, and 12,584 persons per 100,000 population were tested. 6.1% of individuals tested returned a positive result. Ten of the 37 Indian States and Union Territories accounted for about 75.6% of the total cases. Daily testing scaled up from 40,000 initially to nearly one million in March 2021. The median duration between symptom onset and sample collection was two (IQR = 0,3) days, median duration between both sample collection and testing and between testing and data entry were less than or equal to one day. Missing or invalid entries ranged from 0.01% for age to 0.7% for test outcome. Conclusion The laboratory network set-up by ICMR was scaled up massively over a short period, which enabled testing a large section of the population. Although all states and territories were affected, most cases were concentrated in a few large states. Timeliness between the various surveillance activities was acceptable, indicating good responsiveness of the surveillance system.

The role of smart cities in managing the COVID-19 outbreak in India

“…The proposed approach involves five main steps including pre-processing, object detection, human verification, people counting and body tracking. Ponnaiah et al (2021) noted that the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) set up a pan-national laboratory network to diagnose and monitor the COVID-19 outbreak. To monitor the evolution and spread of the pandemic in real-time, 2294 laboratories (as of January 2021) and testing centres were required to enter their records via a web application designed specifically for this purpose.…”

Previous SARS-CoV-2 Infection Status Among the Current RT-PCR-Positive Individuals Affected During the Second Wave of COVID-19 Infections in Chennai, India

“…After the first wave of COVID-19 in India, the transmission of wild Wuhan virus strain was relatively lower between October 2020 and February 2021 ( 1 ). The seroprevalence of Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at the national level was around 25% at the end of December 2020 ( 2 ).…”