COVID-19: Low Testing Rate Ails Madhya Pradesh's Battle Against the Pandemic

Madhya Pradesh does not figure high in the list of states with most confirmed cases. The number one state in the list,  Maharashtra, has conducted 39.39 lakh tests or 31,856 per million population. The state that has second-most number of COVID-19 cases in India is Tamil Nadu and has conducted about 45 lakh tests or  59,064 tests per million population. But Madhya Pradesh has conducted only about 12.7 lakh tests. That amounts to about 15,185 tests per million population, the lowest among most states and union territories. In cumulative figures, on August 27 Madhya Pradesh had 58,181 cases and conducted 1,271,846 tests.

Many a minister has reported contracting the novel coronavirus, so has the state’s Public Health and Family Welfare Minister Prabhuram Choudhary, the seventh Minister besides Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. This can be perceived as symptomatic of a government whose Higher Education Minister Mohan Yadav announced that he had tested positive after attending a religious ceremony in Ujjain.  

In the midst of the attempt to wrest power from the Kamal Nath government, even as  the first cases were announced on March 21, Chouhan remained a one-man cabinet before having a team in July. Meanwhile, as in the chart below, Indore crossed 100 cases on April 2. The cases in the district continue to climb even today. In the chart below the dates of each of the districts when they reached their respective first hundred cases has been adjusted as an offset of when Indore reported its first 100th case, that is April 2. The number of days offset can be seen in the table below.

  The chart on the new cases each week among the most infected states reveals how Bhopal has managed  to see a decline in the number of new cases per week, but the trend seems to have got reversed last week. Bhopal has see the number of recoveries being higher than other districts at about 82.6 per cent and deaths at 2.7 per cent.

Morena district, though, tops the list of recovered cases with more than 93 per cent of the cases recovering, while Barwani district with almost 90 per cent recoveries, is close behind.

Indore, for it sheer number of cases, has also witnessed the most fatalities, at about 3.1 per cent. But Ujjain district (4.8 per cent) and Sagar district (4.5 per cent) have witnessed more fatalities.

Of the districts with high confirmed cases, Indore (26.3 per cent), Gwalior (24.5 per cent), and Jabalpur (23 per cent) have high active cases as well.

If the low testing numbers were a worry, the increasing cases testing positive per week as a percentage of tests conducted has also been increasing, from a high of about 6 per cent at the end of July reducing to  5.4 per cent last week, but that is much higher than the 3.3 per cent the state was reporting in early June.

Madhya Pradesh, as a consequence seems like a state that has not really geared up to manage the pandemic.