Confusion over mismatch in Ministry, ICMR figures

20/04/2020

The discrepancy prompted several questions. “Numbers of positive cases put out today by the States, by ICMR and by Ministry of Health are conflicting and confusing,” former Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, tweeted.

“I rely on the dashboard jointly hosted by M/Health and ICMR. The difference between the dashboard number and ICMR’s number for April 18 is an astonishing 1,573. Will the M/Health and ICMR reconcile their reports from the States and report a uniform number every day?” he asked.

A lag in the numbers reported by the States, the Health Ministry and the ICMR has been a constant since March, particularly after the lockdown. The Health Ministry put it down to it reporting numbers only after breaking it up by State- and-district and getting ground-level confirmation. This, Mr. Agrawal said, led to the “occasional lag.”

The ICMR has also increased the number of labs and widened the pool of people it is testing. As of April 18 (Saturday), there were 194 government or state-funded labs and 82 private labs. All labs have varying capacity and this has contributed to delays in communicating data, said officials in charge of testing labs.

“The very act of sorting out samples can take upto four hours as not all of them are uniformly labelled. It can take upto 6 hours to process a batch (and the number per batch varies too) and generate reports and send. So fluctuations in daily numbers can also be because of processing times,” Rakesh Mishra, Director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, told The Hindu.

Fewer fresh cases

All together 54 districts, spanning 23 states and Union Territories, have reported no fresh cases in 14 days and two — Mahe in Puducherry and Kodagu in Karnataka — have reported no cases in 28 days. The Health Ministry said the country will be graded as red, orange and green zones depending on the number of cases and hotspots, with the containment action and restrictions being most stringent in the red zones.