Hello and welcome to The Moving Curve. I’m Rukmini, a data journalist based in Chennai. Every night on this mini-cast, I consider one question around the novel coronavirus epidemic in India. Tonight I’m considering this one: what happened to contact tracing?
Here’s the new ICMR paper: http://www.ijmr.org.in/temp/IndianJMedRes000-5963153_013923.pdf
South Korea produces a daily press bulletin that is more detailed than the IJMR research paper, and it publishes it every day. I’ve linked to the most recent one, and it shows that fewer than 10% of cases are those in which the contacts, meaning that the source of the infection, is not yet known. Among cases that came up in the last two weeks, just 7% are still under investigation. https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=0030&act=view&list_no=367375&tag=&nPage=1
Writing in the Indian Express just two days ago, reporters Laxman Singh and Tabassum Barnagarwala flagged that Mumbai’s contact tracing was faltering.
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/contact-tracing-how-mumbai-lost-the-momentum-6432020/
It’s hard to overstate just how much of a world of pain bad contact tracing will set us up for.
Thank you for listening. This episode was edited by Anand Krishnamoorthi. Tomorrow — a new question.
