At 650,000, India closes in on 1mn daily tests target

NEW DELHI: There were close to 650,000 tests for Covid-19 across India on Thursday and the average number of daily tests in the last week of July is more than twice of what it was in beginning of the month, according to government data and an analysis by HT, suggesting the country was on track to reach the milliontests-a-day threshold.

As on Friday, India has had 1.69 million cases of the coronavirus disease that has led to 36,549 deaths, making it the third hardest-hit nation after the United States and Brazil, where 155,000 and 91,000 fatalities have respectively taken place.

India has till now carried out close to 19 million tests but will need to ramp up this process further in order to better detect and head off new outbreaks. India’s per million tests as on July 30 comes to about 14,129, a number that has improved from 6,794 on July 1 but is still among the lowest intheworldsinceithastheworld’s second-largest population. The roughly 19 million tests is equivalent to 1.5% of the population.

Ramping up testing was among the issues discussed by Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on Friday during the meeting of the Group of Ministers (GOM) on Covid-19. “The measures to be taken include revamping the strategy for effective management of containment zones through stricter perimeter control; widespread rapid antigen tests; intensive and rapid door-to-door search…,” said the minister.

The antigen tests the minister referred to has emerged as key to India’s disease surveillance efforts – the test takes at most 30 minutes and costs nearly a fifth of the lab tests, which can take at least a day for results to show but is largely seen to be more reliable.

The strategy will be crucial to detect new hot spots that are now believed to be emerging in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh – away from the previous infection hotbeds of Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu.

Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Sikkim, Telangana, Gujarat, UP and Kerala are among states that have recorded the biggest improvement in weekly testing numbers. Arunachal’s numbers were up 622% while UP’S rose by 257%. On the other hand, Bihar, West Bengal, MP and Karnataka recorded some of the slowest growth in daily testing.

ICMR data suggests the increase has largely been due to antigen tests, which were rolled out on June 14 and now account for 10% of all tests conducted.