Mumbai crosses 5-million Covid tests, 2 million conducted in 2 months

On Wednesday alone, 47,270 samples were tested of which 7,654 were found to be positive with a positivity rate of 16.19%. The city also reported 62 deaths on Wednesday. This took the city’s case tally to 601,713 and toll to 12,508. The city’s recovery rate is 83% with 504,466 recoveries and fatality rate is 2.07%.

The city crossed the five-million mark of testing Covid-19 samples, one year after testing took off on February 3, 2020. Of the five million samples tested as of Tuesday, around 1.9 million samples were tested in the past two months as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) ramped up its testing.

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According to the figures, Mumbai was testing around 20,000 samples daily till February. However, Mumbai’s testing capacity has gone up to around 50,000 daily on weekdays since March 23. As of Tuesday, Mumbai had tested 5,075,152 samples and the overall positivity rate is 11.70%.

The 100,000- mark was crossed in May, 200,000 in June, 500,000 in July, followed by one-million mark in September last year. In February this year, the number further crosses the three-million mark, and the four-million mark in March. In terms of Maharashtra, a total of 24 million tests have been conducted in the past one year.

Mumbai was the first city in the country to liberalise testing starting July 2020. Under this, any citizen wanting to get tested for Covid-19 was allowed to get tested. Before this, only symptomatic patients or those having prescription from a doctor were allowed to get tested.

Since July 2020, BMC also started usage of rapid antigen kits that give results in 30 minutes but are less reliable. BMC initially maintained the ratio of 30% of the tests being conducted daily via rapid antigen kits and remaining via RT-PCR kits. Later, it went up to 50% in December 2020. Currently, 60% of the tests are conducted using RT-PCR method and 40% using rapid antigen kits.

On Wednesday alone, 47,270 samples were tested of which 7,654 were found to be positive with a positivity rate of 16.19%. The city also reported 62 deaths on Wednesday. This took the city’s case tally to 601,713 and toll to 12,508. The city’s recovery rate is 83% with 504,466 recoveries and fatality rate is 2.07%. There are 83,450 active cases in the city.

Further, owing to the surge in cases, the daily positivity rate in the city had gone up to 25% in the first week of April, which has since come down to around 15%. However, though the number of testing in Mumbai has increased drastically in the past one month, there is a huge difference in the number of tests conducted in Mumbai and Delhi. Mumbai conducted around 45,000 tests on Tuesday whereas Delhi conducted tests on around 86,000 samples.

Experts maintain that though the city’s testing has been scaled up drastically, Mumbai requires more. Dr Madhav Sathe, former microbiology professor at BYL Nair Hospital, said, “If tests are not increased beyond 50,000 per day, we must ensure that the results are given to the patient at least within 24 hours after sample collection. Also, more tests should be done in those parts of Mumbai where very few RT-PCR tests are done daily. An attempt should be made to increase the test number up to 60,000 to 70,000 tests per day, and the motto should be to trace early, test fast and treat immediately.”

Meanwhile, Mumbai mayor Kishori Pednekar on Wednesday, while talking to reporters, said, “I request citizens in Mumbai to not lower their guard. We are witnessing that daily cases have stabilised in the city, but we need to ensure that our cases remain under control by following Covid-appropriate behaviour.”