NEW DELHI:  The Delhi government continues to conduct less number of RT-PCR tests and rely more on rapid antigen testing despite the Delhi high court’s clear orders to ramp up RT-PCR tests.

Last week, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had said his government had decided to increase the number of sampling done through RT-PCR and that he had instructed officials in all districts to comply with the ICMR guidelines.

The state government had directed the officials last Wednesday to ensure strict compliance of the ICMR guidelines on RTPCR testing. Orders were also issued to all districts to increase the testing capacity to 11,000 per day across all 50 testing centres. But in the past one week, RTPCR testing has remained less than 6,000. According to the state government’s bulletin on Wednesday, the state government had conducted only 4,870 RT-PCR tests while 11,915 were RAT.

Calls and messages to health secretary Padmini Singla went unanswered. “The government needs to increase the RT-PCR testing, it is abysmally low now. The negative reports of RAT cannot be fully trusted. More RTPCR will reveal the actual scenario and the real picture of positivity rate can be understood,” said Dr Naval Vikram, Professor, Medicine Department, AIIMS. In Delhi, the RAT was introduced to combat with the rising cases in June and to conduct more testing, especially in containment zones.

While the government was initially doing more than 20,000 tests on an average, it came down past two weeks. Last week, a Delhi high court bench headed by Justice Hima Kohli and Justice Subramonium Prasad, responding to a PIL, had said that while Delhi should be carrying out 11,000 RT-PCR tests a day in the 54 laboratories of the city. “The ICMR never said that RT-PCR, which is the gold standard test, be replaced with RAT.

In such a scenario how can the Delhi government go with RAT as its front line test, when its rate of false negatives was very high, with RT-PCR being recommended for only those who were symptomatic,” it stated. As per the Delhi government’s affidavit, 4,04,141 lakh rapid tests were carried out between June 18 and July 24.

Out of this, only 2,818 people who showed symptoms were retested through RT-PCR method, of which 404 tested positive. In the meantime, after a gap of three days, new cases crossed 1,000 and the active cases once again went above the 10,000 mark. On Tuesday, the active cases went down to four digits after a gap of two months.