A tangerine and orange comparison

UP has a transparent data generation process for reporting positive cases, writes Alok Kumar, Principal Secretary for Medical Education in the UP government

In his article, “UP: Covid outlier or data fudger” published on May 20, Omkar Goswami has concluded: “To please the powers in Lucknow, district authorities started eliminating a large number of Covid positive reports when passing the data to the State.” The basis of this assertion is that UP’s Test Positivity Rate (TPR) is consistently lower than that of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Maharashtra. The hypothesis was that TPRs should be similar in all states facing similar levels of pandemic. On the face of it, the explanation seems plausible. The author makes the cardinal error of