Covid In Sri Lanka: Poor Testing Leading To Wrong Projections

MAY 27, 2020


A quick glance at worldwide corona virus data indicates that there is a glaring deficit in testing in Sri Lanka, statistics experts told Colombo Telegraph.

When significant testing done within a population of a country, a trend can usually be determined after a certain period of time.

This data can be useful to make key decisions such as reopening the economy, lifting lockdowns and easing social distancing regulations.

The data for India shows a steady increase in Corona cases on a daily basis. The UK graph shows a gradual decrease while the US data also shows a downward trajectory even though at a much slower pace. Every country graph shows a distinct pattern.

The following is Sri Lanka’s Covid 19 data.

A quick glimpse of the Sri Lanka graph shows no such trend.

Instead the graph shows an erratic pattern is usually a sign of a sample size. Sri Lanka has performed just over 50,000 tests, testing less than 0.2 percent of its 21 million population.

Furthermore, much of these tests are repeat testing on forces personnel and security teams linked to political VIPs.

To use a familiar graph, it would be similar to the initial ‘run rate worm’ in a cricket match where the first few overs could show an erratic pattern because the number of runs is divided by fewer overs. As the number of overs increase the rate shows greater stability.

Sri Lanka’s graph typically shows two or three days of low infection rates followed by spikes when testing is performed – for instance on Kuwaitee returnees who have formed a new large cluster of cases. Health authorities are only permitted to test forces personnel, persons in Quarantine centers, those returning from overseas and those considered to be high risk once some contact tracing is performed. There is no wider testing for COVID or COVID-19 antibodies – which is a much less expensive blood test than the swab test for the virus.

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