Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, has claimed more than 7,000 deaths worldwide. The number of cases across the globe have ballooned past 180,000. Now, there are more Covid-19 cases outside than inside China, the origin of the virus.

In India, total confirmed cases are 125 out of which two people have died, 17 are foreign nationals and 13 people have recovered.

It’s one of the select few big countries that has the lowest number of cases. The obvious reason behind this is the early panic shown by the government in responding to the fast-spreading disease.

Severe travel restrictions came on 26 February, five days before two new cases were reported in India, limited to passengers coming from China. These were updated regularly. On 11 March, more extensive measures were announced, suspending all non-work, non-diplomatic visas and announcing mandatory 14-day quarantine for all travellers coming from top hotspots.

Yesterday, the government added countries in the Middle East to the list as well and put a complete ban on flights from European countries.

On top of this, the government has been screening passengers at airports for high viral load much before the Western countries started doing it.

The government has been aggressively doing contact-tracing of thousands of people who came in contact with the infected.

Thousands more are under community surveillance and are being checked for symptoms.

All these measures, which are being updated regularly and improvised quickly depending on the evolving situation, have helped India contain the outbreak and made sure that India is still in Stage 2 of this pandemic (Stage 1 is when a country has only imported cases, stage 2 is when there is local transmission, stage 3 is when “community transmission” has started and stage 4 is a full-blown pandemic).

However, some “professional pessimists” and obsessive compulsive critics of the government are not able to digest the low number of cases in India. India has few cases because it is not doing enough tests, they claim.

One digital news portal even came up with a novel metric of “tests per million population” to show India as far behind countries such as South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy and China.

This is absurd to say the least, and not just because India’s population is more than most of these countries combined.

It’s a perfect way of torturing the data enough to reach a conclusion that is in line with one’s bias.

First of all, if India is to be compared with these countries, then we have to compare it to them when they had cases at India’s level, not at where they are currently. India is far ahead of them. When the US had 400 cases and India only 34, the former had conducted less than 2,000 tests while the latter had done more than 3,400.

And while making such comparisons and concluding that “less number of cases is due to less testing” as proved to be the case in some countries, we shouldn’t forget that India has done more than any other country in putting border restrictions, which has reduced the probability of community transmission that had already happened in those countries which woke up too late.

India has been well ahead of the curve because it realised early that stopping the import of virus at airports is easier than controlling its spread later in the communities.

When the case number is low and resources are limited, as is the case with Covid-19 diagnostic kits as well as healthcare infrastructure, it makes much more sense to concentrate efforts in limiting spread from high probability areas (like airports) which is exactly what India has done.

Second, the critics do not understand how sampling works.