The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorisation, its first for the use of pooled testing in the country, on July 18, as the number of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases continued to rise, and with many states struggling to meet demand for testing. The 7-day average of new cases in the US, on July 18, according to the New York Times database, was around 66,000.

Pooled testing isn’t a new concept, and even in the current context of Covid-19, there has been talk of using it in India to boost testing capacity (Hindustan Times wrote about this in the early days of the pandemic here). Pooled testing is simply about pooling samples into lots, testing the lots and then testing individual samples in lots that test positive for the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes the coronavirus disease. India has been an early adopter of antigen testing, and the Indian Council of Medical Research has now asked states to aggressively use rapid antigen tests, HT reported late last week. It should consider pooled testing too, for this will increase testing capacity. India, as I’ve said time and again in the column, should be testing a million people a day. It does around 300,000 a day on average currently.

India registered 37,774 new cases of Covid-19 on Saturday, taking its total tally of infections to 1,076,479 (according to the Hindustan Times dashboard). Of this, 26,812 people have died and 677,565 have recovered — resulting in 372,102 active cases. The number of new cases continues to rise (there’s a new daily record almost every other day) and India is on course to add another million cases before August 15. Now, imagine daily cases not rising but beginning to come down, perhaps two weeks from now.

That’s well within the realm of the possible.

Last week, in a speech and then an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, said the disease could be controlled in four to eight weeks if “we could get everyone to wear a mask right now”, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Redfield cited research in the US on health care workers that showed that universal masking significantly reduced infections passed on by patients even in this high-risk group. Yet, despite universal masking rules that many US states have imposed, law enforcement agencies indicate that they probably will not be actively enforcing the rule. The general opinion seems to be that it is a little disproportionate to penalise someone for something as trivial as not wearing a mask (although, in current circumstances, a person not wearing a mask is probably as dangerous as one waving a gun).

Yet, when things head south, the first thing administrators do — the most recent case being Melbourne over the weekend — is to make the wearing of masks mandatory. Masking and social distancing are the only guaranteed ways to prevent infections.

There are a variety of reasons why people do not wear masks but all of them can be traced back to plain stupidity. There can be no medical reason for the majority of people not to wear a mask. Research has shown that wearing a mask (or actually multiple masks) does not affect oxygen intake in any way — although the exhalation does cause glasses to mist up.

If India continues on its current trajectory, it may well be seeing at least around 75,000 cases a day by the middle of August. The US is the only country to have seen those levels (it recorded a little less than 75,000 cases on July 17). Now, imagine a scenario where India isn’t seeing 75,000 cases by August 15, but a much lower number. Universal masking can make that happen — provided the federal government and the states get serious about enforcement.

Can India and Indians, famed for the inability to maintain queues (or understand the concept of personal space) in good times do better than the US in bad times?