Senior Congress leader Alka Lamba alleged the Arvind Government of deliberately “adopting” a particular coronavirus testing model to hide the actual figures of Covid-19 pandemic in the national capital.

Addressing the media, Lamba said that the method to cover up the Covid surge was to hold more Rapid Antigen Tests, instead of the gold standard RT-PCR tests. She said that between November 1 and 24; Rapid Antigen Tests consisted of 63 per cent but in the same period, out of the RT-PCR tests conducted among 4.11 lakh people, 28.6 per cent turned out to be Covid positive. She said that in the same period, 14 per cent Covid positives turned out in Delhi (Rapid-RT-PCR), though thousands of Covid-affected might have escaped detection because the majority of the tests were rapid antigen.            

“The Congress has been demanding ever since that all those Rapid Antigen Test negatives should be re-tested through RT-PCR to detect all positive cases. The Delhi High Court had also raised questions about holding more Rapid Antigen Tests than the reliable RT-PCR tests.

Lamba said that when 10,000 daily tests per million were needed in November, the Arvind Government conducted only 2700 tests, which was 83 per cent less than what was required.

“The door-to-door survey being conducted by the Delhi Government should have concluded by last Wednesday but the survey is yet to finish. She said that as per the statistics available by Wednesday, 14 per cent symptomatic cases had not bothered to get tested. The survey was conducted on 57 lakh people, out of which 13516 showed Covid symptoms while only 11790 people had got tested for Corona till Wednesday.