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People power: How India is attempting to slow the coronavirus

Without enough test kits, the 1.3-billion-person country is using a gigantic surveillance network to trace and quarantine infected people.
  1. Gayathri Vaidyanathan
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Like many nations, India does not have enough kits to test most of its population for the new coronavirus. The country is instead relying on people power: thousands of health-care workers are fanning out across the country to trace and quarantine people who might have had contact with those with COVID-19. People are typically only tested if they develop symptoms.

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Nature 580, 442 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01058-5

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 12 April 2020: A previous version of this story misstated the timing of monitoring efforts to identify COVID-19 infections.

References

  1. Singh, R. & Adhikari, R. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12055 (2020).

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