Delhi is reporting the most Covid cases but 81% of them are not being reported at all, says survey

• Delhi has been reporting around 1,000-1,700 new COVID-10 cases on a daily basis.
• Daily cases in the national capital might be going unreported, says a new survey.
• 6 out of 10 people in Delhi who had almost all the COVID-19 symptoms did not take a COVID-19 test.

India’s COVID-19 tally is inching upwards after a massive decline for almost 11 weeks. Half of the cases hail from the national capital, but that too is not the whole story.

Two out of three cases in Delhi are going unreported, says a survey by LocalCircles survey. In fact six out of ten people in Delhi who had ‘almost all’ the COVID-19 symptoms like fever, cold and cough, sore throat, congestion, body ache – did not take a COVID-19 test.

The LocalCircle survey is a community social media platform, receiving responses from 23,500 people residing in Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, and Faridabad.

Only 22% of the respondents said they took the COVID test only once, while 12% tested themselves multiple times. Between April and May, around 55% - a little more than half of those surveyed had one or more COVID-19 symptoms between April 1 and till May 10.

It could be inferred that the government data covers only 19% of people with COVID symptoms in Delhi-NCR - thereby missing out 81% who might have it, the survey says.

The survey report further highlighted that 42% of the people who took the test opted for the Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) rather than an RT-PCR. As per Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) guidelines, only symptomatic patients may go for the RT-PCR test, which goes for a laboratory test and the result is usually obtained in 8 hours or so.

The RAT COVID-19 test has become popular as it is much more convenient, can be taken at home and get the results in 10 minutes. The RAT tests go unreported and are also considered to be much more unreliable than RT-PCR.

Delhi has become the epicenter of COVID-19 cases. It has been reporting around 1,000-1,700 new cases daily for the past three weeks, with a test positivity rate (TPR) between 3-9%. On May 11, it reported 1,032 new cases and zero deaths and a positivity rate of 3.64%.

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