Despite a week of panic due to rising Covid-19 cases in other parts of the world, residents of Mumbai are reluctant to undergo RT-PCR tests. Even in the towers and plush localities, where residents were particular to get tested in the earlier pandemic waves, there is not much enthusiasm about testing now, said Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) health officials.

Reports on the rise of cases in China due to Covid-19 variants hit the country hard last week. The central and state governments issued precautionary guidelines that include scaling up RT-PCR tests at civic corporations level. But the number of tests hasn’t gone up, as people are reluctant to get them done. The daily average of tests was 2,255 till December 20. Even in the past four days there hasn’t been any change in test numbers. The test positivity rate (TPR) is also on the lower side at less than 0.5 per cent. Till Sunday there were 50 active patients in Mumbai.