India conducts over 5.15 lakh COVID tests in last 24 hours: ICMR
Jul 27, 2020
New Delhi [India], July 27 : In an effort to boost COVID testing to combat the virus pandemic, India has recorded highest single-day testing - of over 5.15 lakh tests to diagnose COVID-19 in last 24 hours, officials from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said as the country's COVID tally on Monday crossed 14 lakh mark.
In the past 24 hours, 5,15,472 samples were tested on 26 July in the country with a total of 1,68,06,803 samples have been tested till date, said the official.
In an effort to ramp up testing capacity, ICMR has approved a total of 1,310 COVID-19 testing labs in both public (906) and private sector (404). This includes RT-PCR labs (668); TrueNat Labs (536) and CBNAAT Labs (106).
"ICMR advises all concerned state governments, public and private institutions to take required steps to scale-up testing for COVID19. Since testing, tracking and treatment is the only way to prevent the spread of infection and save lives, it is imperative that testing should be made widely available to all symptomatic individuals in every part of the country and contact tracing mechanisms for containment of infection are further strengthened," said latest advisory of ICMR on COVID-19 strategies.
"The Central Government has advised all State and UT governments to keep up the strategy of 'Test, Track and Treat' with aggressive testing which may lead to a higher number of daily positive cases initially but would eventually achieve a decline as has been demonstrated after Union Government's targeted efforts in the national capital," said an official of the Health Ministry.
"Recently, the WHO has issued a guidance note on public health criteria to adjust public health and social measures in the context of COVID-19. In this document, WHO underlines the need for comprehensive surveillance and testing of suspect cases and they further elaborated the meaning of 'comprehensive surveillance' stating that if a country is testing 140 people per day per 10 lakh (one million) population. So, we are taking that indication from the WHO document. In the Indian context, there are over 22 states which are conducting over 140 tests per day per million population," said the official.
The official said that are certain states which require major containment strategy, testing and clinical management.
The death toll due to COVID-19 rose to 32,771 and the total number of cases climbed to 14,35,453 in India after it registered 708 fatalities and a record single-day spike of 49,931 cases till Monday 8 AM, according to the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry data.
