An alternative school of thought has emerged to challenge the efficacy of continuously scaling up testing, one of the three Ts comprising the Union government's strategy of "test, track, treat" for controlling the spread of the Novel Coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2, which has infected over 40 lakh people and already claimed over 70,000 lives in India. This school believes the quest to conduct at least 10 lakh tests a day, crossed on August 21, has turned this exercise indiscriminate and is bleeding the state dry.

The alternative school's view overturns the rationale behind the government's testing strategy, which seeks to identify and isolate those infected for controlling the community transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Since large parts of India are already in community transmission, this school says that large-scale testing for isolating the infected is as good as taking out a few buckets of water from a swimming pool.