'I'm Optimistic About Fall in Active COVID Cases But it's Now Clear Lockdown Was Terrible Mistake'

In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire Prof. Jayaprakash Muliyil said he was not worried that the heavy reliance on rapid antigen testing, where up to 50% tests can show a false negative, raises doubts about whether the numbers are actually falling in reality or because of faulty and poor testing. He said “the ones you miss out on are not likely to be infectious”. He added that RT-PCR tests have a tendency to show false positives. He said the reliance on antigen testing did not worry him.
Speaking about the Op-ed in yesterday’s Hindu (29/9) by T. Jacob John and M. S. Seshadri which claims India peaked in the middle of September and is now slowly but steadily declining, Prof. Muliyil said this was probably true of urban India but he was not at all sure if it was true of the situation in rural India.