Coronavirus | Priyanka demands more testing

An opportunity for people to put up a united fight: Rahul

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Monday asked prominent people to raise their voice to demand more testing for coronavirus, while her brother and former party chief Rahul Gandhi said the pandemic also offered an opportunity to people to put aside their differences and fight as one.

“The #Coronavirus is an opportunity for India to unite as one people, putting aside differences of religion, caste & class; to forge one common purpose: the defeat of this deadly virus. Compassion, empathy& self sacrifice are central to this idea. Together we will win this battle,” he tweeted.

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The tweet comes a day after the Union government said the number of COVID-19 positive cases doubled in 4.1 days after the Tablighi Jamaat event.

In a two-and-half minute video message posted on twitter, Ms. Vadra said the only way to prevent the infection of coronavirus was through more and more testing.

“Testing not only enables us to determine who has the coronavirus, it also gives us the extremely valuable information about the severity of the disease, disease clusters and th areas that need to be isolated,” she said.

Though Italy and South Korea had similar size population, the Asian country managed to control the spread of the coronavirus pandemic only because of testing their citizens ‘every minute’, while the European country failed to do so.

“Unfortunately a look at existing data shows that the rate of testing in our country is nowhere near what it should be,”she said, adding that the next two weeks would determine India’s future and testing needed to be exponentially ramped up.

“Consider this one statistic. Only 5 per cent of our population is over 60 million people. That’s larger the whole of Italy and larger than South Korea. Even if one per cent of our population is severely affected by Covid 19, that is more than 13 million patients for our hospital to handle. The burden on our hospital will be overwhelming,” Ms Vadra said.

She appealed to political leaders, party workers, media, scientists and celebrities “to raise their voice and convince our government to increase testing now”.

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