A majority of the sates in India have already met the World health Organisation (WHO) guidelines that called for 140 tests per day per million population. As many as 22 states in the country have been conducting 140 and more tests per day per million population, according to the Ministry of Health.
WHO in its Guidance Note on “Public Health Criteria to Adjust Public Health and Social Measures in the Context of COVID-19” has advised comprehensive surveillance for suspected cases. While explaining the concept of comprehensive surveillance and testing of suspect cases, WHO advises that a country needs 140 tests per day per million population.
The Ministry said that the steadily growing network of labs for testing of COVID-19 was one of the factors helped in the increasing numbers of COVID-19 tests in the country. India has a total 1223 labs with 865 labs in the government sector and 358 private labs. In addition to the gold standard for test, RT PCR, TrueNat and CBNAAT are also used to augment this facility, the Ministry said.
In the last 24 hours, 3,20,161 samples were tested. The cumulative number of samples tested, as of now is 1,24,12,664. The testing per million for India is consistently rising and touched 8994.7. More than 3.2 lakh tests were done on a single day.
