India has eased its COVID-19 rules on testing, quarantine and hospital admissions in a bid to free up resources for its neediest people — a strategy hailed by experts, even though it carries the risk of a heavy undercount of infections and deaths.
The moves will offer breathing space for health care facilities — often overstretched in a nation of 1.4 billion — as they battle a thirty-threefold surge in infections over the past month with the highly contagious omicron variant.
This week, federal authorities told states to drop mandatory testing for contacts of confirmed cases unless they were old or battling other conditions, and halved the isolation period to a week while recommending hospital care only for the seriously ill.