Need aggressive testing: Harvard expert tells Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi, May 27: Speaking to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, global public health professional Ashish Jha said that not just lockdown, aggressive testing is needed to tackale the deadly coronavirus.

"I have asked some bureaucrats about the lower testing numbers. Their point is that if you push testing numbers high you frighten people more. You build a much more frightening narrative. This is unofficially what that they say," said Rahul Gandhi while speaking to public health expert Prof Ashish Jha.

"The reason for a lockdown is that you are trying to stop the spread of the virus. Humanity has never seen this virus. This means we are all susceptible, said professor Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

"You can slow down the virus through a lockdown, but it has great economic repercussions. But authorities should utilise that time to prepare their testing infrastructure. It's about planning everything for the time that's coming," he added.

"Now, when you open the economy, you have to give people confidence. Economy works on confidence," said professor Jha.

This is the third such interaction in on-going series of dialogues with globally recognised experts on economics, social sciences, healthcare and other areas, on tackling the Covid-19 crisis.

Previous episodes have featured conversations with world-renowned economist Raghuram Rajan and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee.

The former Congress president said on Tuesday that lockdown has failed.

"I want to ask the government with utmost humility and in a completely non-partisan manner, what is the Government's plan to tackle this growing crisis? It is now clear that 4 stages of lockdown haven't delivered results that were anticipated. What is the government's plan B?", read the letter adding that there were 'many critical questions that the government was not providing answers to," said Rahul.