NEW DELHI: With coronavirus COVID-19 ) cases increasing, India’s apex medical body is intensifying the random sampling of people who display flu-like symptoms but don’t have any history of travel to outbreak zones to determine whether community transmission is taking place.Each of the 51 Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) laboratories is to test 10 such samples every week. The exercise began on March 15. Before this, the ICMR had picked up 20 samples and tested them at 13 labs to check for community transmission between February 15 and 29.“Since the number of cases are more, we are more aggressive now,” said Nivedita Gupta, scientist, epidemiology and communicable diseases, ICMR. “We thought that in order to rule out community transmission, let’s keep on checking these samples also for the presence for Covid-19.”This comes as reports from other countries suggest that the spread of Covid-19 by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic may be responsible for more transmission than previously thought.ICMR experts aren’t convinced about following South Korea’s strategy, which has reported more recoveries from Covid-19 than new infections through aggressive testing without any lockdowns. Indian experts said they will revise the testing protocol depending on the situation.“The testing strategy will completely change if we find any positive case in these random samples that we plan to test,” Gupta said. According to ICMR director general Balram Bhargava, “The testing protocol is a moving target...The testing strategy will be revised in a week’s time if it’s needed to and having looked at the circumstances.” South Korea, where the outbreak is said to have stabilised, is mass testing nearly 20,000 people every day and has a fatality rate of 0.7%. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that asymptomatic transmission is a possibility.“Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads,” according to the CDC website.Gupta said the government wants to avoid blanket checks. “First of all, we don’t want to do any indiscriminate testing as now everybody is asking for a test, so somewhere you will have to rationalise the test,” she said.Only those “with travel history to high-risk countries, anyone who had contact with a lab-positive person is requested to be quarantined or home quarantined for 14 days,” as per ICMR guidelines, Bhargava said. “During those 14 days, if he becomes symptomatic, he should be laboratory tested. If the person is asymptomatic, he doesn’t need to be tested.”Other than the network of ICMR testing laboratories, there 35-40 government-run facilities that are acting as collection centres.Bhargava is “not worried about capacity” and there’s no discussion about roping in private units. India can currently conduct up to 10,000 tests a day. The ICMR laboratories have about 100,000 testing kits and an additional 200,000 have been ordered, said RR Gangakhedkar, ICMR chief epidemiologist.The number of positive Covid-19 cases in the country rose to 107 on Sunday, including 17 foreign nationals. Two people are confirmed to have died of the disease, one in Delhi and the other in Karnataka.