After facing massive criticism for low number of testing for Covid-19, India has now started conducting 60,000 tests per day. This will be ramped up to 1 lakh tests per day within next few days, said Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday.
Addressing a video conference here with the members of Lion Club International here, he said, “The Government is working to increase the testing capacity to 1,00,000 tests per day in the next few days.”
However, additional tests will require more human resources for data entry, re-deploying automated and manual RT-PCR (Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction) machines and optimising in-lab processes, such as RNA extraction, to reduce the turnaround time between sample receipt and testing, it said.
As on Wednesday, the ICMR said India had conducted a total of 7,70,764 tests since the outbreak of the disease. However, there was no detail on the number of tests done on Wednesday. Health experts feel that India is yet to reach to its peak as sufficient number of people was not being tested and treated.
Currently, 288 Government laboratories are working along with 97 private labs chains with around 16,000 sample collection centres and around 60,000 tests per day.
He said since the last three days the doubling rate of Covid-19 cases has slowed to 11.3 days in the country, with a mortality rate of 3 per cent against the global average of 7 per cent.
Close to 40 per cent of the total deaths are in Maharashtra where 400 have died of Corona, so far.
Claiming that the Government has been providing quality health services to the patients, the Minister said only 0.33 per cent patients are on ventilators, 1.5 per cent patients are on oxygen support while 2.34 per cent are in the Intensive Care Units.
The Ministry has also pushed its integrated disease surveillance programme (IDSP), a nation-wide surveillance system for epidemic prone diseases, strengthening it with “substantive digital inputs,” the Minister added.
“The Ministry of Science and Technology, under my charge, has also been working on innovations and have been funding certain projects which are going to make the testing procedure quite fast,” Vardhan said.
The Health Minister also asserted that India has successfully tackled public health emergencies of international concern and pandemics in the past as well. “Our nation has the requisite national core capacities stipulated in the international health regulations to manage public health emergencies,” he added.
Vardhan said India had maintained continuous situation awareness, with pre-emptive and proactive approach and followed a graded response as per continuously evolving scenario to tackle Covid-19 pandemic.