At NIV: Confirmed cases, suspect test

Asked if the disease was really caused by the coronavirus in question, Mishra said, ‘‘Of course. CDC and WHO have all said it. Besides, our tests showed the virus in all the samples, blood, throat and urine. We have excellent primers from Germany and the genetic sequence of the virus is available on the Internet.”

On why we do not have full blown cases, Mishra had said that the sample was too small to make a comment on. But if there is one person for whom today’s announcement will come as no surprise it is Dr. Kalyan Banerjee, retired NIV Director.

‘‘There are hundreds of coronaviruses that we live peacefully with in India. The PCR if done in a generalised manner could very easily test positive for a number of these strains,’’ Banerjee told The Indian Express on Tuesday.

Banerjee joked — half seriously — that if we take a swab off randomly selected healthy children in India they would test positive for pneumonia and a number of other common respiratory illnesses.

‘‘But the PCR alone is meaningless. Presence of virus does not mean presence of the disease. How do we even know that this virus caused the disease? A fundamental difference no one bothered looking into. Basic epidemiological common sense,” said Banerjee. There are those, of course, who defend the testing procedures that put so many Indians on the front pages as ‘‘SARS victims.’’ ‘‘But we cannot be hasty in demonising the authorities. All the cases that tested positive, did have a distinct travel history and did have symptoms.

There is no testing gold standard yet so merely on loose clinical and epidemiological clues for SARS these people had to be viewed as suspect,’’ says Dr.S.M.Sapatnekar, Director of the Haffkine Institute, Mumbai.