‘Ramping up testing will frighten people’: Rahul Gandhi quotes bureaucrats during conversation with Harvard health expert

Coronavirus test in India, Coronavirus testing lab: Rahul Gandhi said he has asked bureaucrats the reason behind low testing in the country and they said ramping up testing will make people frightened.

Coronavirus India update: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has made a veiled attack on the Modi government, doubling down on the opposition’s attacks for low scale testing of coronavirus in India. During a conversation with Harvard health expert Ashish Jha, Rahul said that he has asked bureaucrats the reason behind low testing in the country and they said ramping up testing will make people frightened.

“I have asked some bureaucrats, why 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 they say,” news agency ANI quoted him as telling Ashish Jha.

The Congress party has been attacking the Modi government over low testing of Covid-19 in the country. It has said that the low cases are being reported due to low testing.

“Yeh bhaiya bataiye ki vaccine kab aayegi? (Tell me brother when will the vaccine come?),” Rahul Gandhi asked the public health expert. To this, he replied: “I am very confident a vaccine will come by next year.”

Rahul said that life is going to change after COVID-19. “9/11 was a new chapter, this will be a new book,” he said.

Rahul spoke to Jha and Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke on Tuesday and it was aired on Wednesday morning on social media. He is speaking to experts as part of his ongoing series of dialogues with globally recognised experts in economics, social sciences, healthcare on tackling the COVID-19 crisis.

Previously, he had held conversations with former RBI governor and economist Raghuram Rajan and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee.

Meanwhile, the Health Ministry said that the country has reported spike of 6387 new COVID19 cases and 170 deaths in the last 24 hours. Total number of cases in the country now at 1,51,767 including 83004 active cases, 64425 cured/discharged and 4337 deaths.