Record 11.70 lakh Covid-19 tests conducted in last 24 hours

New Delhi: India is continuously scaling up its testing capacity for Covid-19 samples. Today, it reached a big milestone by conducting highest number of Covid tests by testing over 11.72 lakh samples in past 24 hours.

In last 5 months, the ways govt has augmented labs for testing Covid-19 is praiseworthy. From 160 labs testing Covid samples on March 23 this year, the country today has 1,623 labs. Out of these, 1,022 are government labs while remaining 601 are private. It’s because of this increase in labs, there has been significant step-up in testing rate.

So far, with an overall testing figure of 4.55 crore, the nation has also been able to maintain a remarkably low positivity rate of around 8.5 per cent. Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh have recorded a positivity rate even lower than 5%.

Health Ministry said that high levels of testing sustained over a period of time in widespread areas has enabled early diagnosis of cases and facilitated seamless isolation and hospitalisation. It said this has also led to low mortality rate.

62% of active Covid cases from 5 states

Health Ministry in its press briefing said, “The number of recovered cases is now more than 29.70 lakh which is 3.5 times more than active cases. More than 11 lakh Covid tests have been done in the last 24 hours. Single-day highest recovery of 68,584 has been recorded yesterday”.

Five states — Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra account for 62% of total active cases in the country.

Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra account for 70% of total Covid deaths in the count.

There has been 13.7% weekly decrease in the number of active cases in Andhra Pradesh, 16.1% decrease in Karnataka, 6.8% decrease in Maharashtra and 23.9% decrease in Tamil Nadu, 17.1% decrease in Uttar Pradesh.