Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
AMBANI TO SET UP FAMILY COUNCIL FOR SUCCESSION PLAN LET LAW TAKE ITS COURSE IN SUSHANT CASE: SWARA Daily tests inch closer to targeted 1mn mark
COVID CRISIS 830,000 conducted on Wednesday as testing infra being scaled up
NEWDELHI: India tested in excess of 800,000 samples for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) on Wednesday, inching closer to its target of conducting a million tests a day even as infections of the viral disease have continued to mount steadily.
In total, India has performed 26.8 million tests since January 22 when Covid-19 testing started with one lab at the Indian Council of Medical Research’s National Institute of Virology in Pune. As of Thursday, testing is being done in 1,433 labs across the country — 947 in the public sector and 486 private ones.
Experts say that to control the outbreak, aggressive testing is crucial. In this case, the number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in the country is likely to see an increase before it starts seeing a dip, indicating that the spread is slowing. Until Thursday, India recorded 2,459,275 cases and 48,140 deaths.
India has conducted 20,140 tests per million residents — much lower than other countries that have comparable caseloads. In comparison, the United States and Brazil, the only two nations with more cases than India, have conducted 204,130 and 62,197 tests for every million residents.
The country’s target of conducting a million tests a day would mean that it would be conducting 750 tests per million per day — significantly higher than the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommendation of 140 tests per million residents a day. To be sure, India is still testing much above the WHO advisory – in the last week, the country has tested an average of 503 people per million every day.
For the week ending August 12, India’s daily tests have increased by 2.8% every day on average.
This number was the same the week before that. If this rate of increase in daily testing remains constant, then the country may touch the 1 million-daily-test mark in 12 days, according to HT’s projections.
The four highest single-day tests conducted across the country have all been reported in the past five days — 830,391 daily tests on August 12; 733,449 on August 11; 719,364 on August 8 and 698,290 on August 9 – highlighting the recent increase. On August 9 (Sunday) 477,023 samples were tested.