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12 states conduct more Covid-19 tests per million per day than national average: Data
Testing in Kerala is the highest at 3,258, followed by Delhi with 3,225 tests and followed by Karnataka with 1,550 tests.
India’s national average of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) tests per million per day is 844, with at least 12 states performing more tests per million per day than the national average, shows government data.
Testing in Kerala is the highest at 3,258, followed by Delhi with 3,225 tests and followed by Karnataka with 1,550 tests.
The World Health Organisation recommends 140 tests per million population per day. “And 35 states and union territories are currently performing more than the WHO recommended number, which is enough to say that as far as testing goes, India is doing fairly adequate Covid-19 testing,” said a health ministry official, who did not want to be named.
Other states and territories that are performing more tests per million per day than the national average are Andhra Pradesh (1,418), Bihar (1,093), Odisha (1,072), Goa (1,058), Jharkhand (994), Jammu & Kashmir (984), Telangana (947), Tamil Nadu (936), and Haryana (863).
India has tested 107 million cumulative samples for Covid-19 so far, of which 81,36,232 have returned positive.
On January 23, the first Covid-19 test was conducted in India at ICMR- National Institute of Virology in Pune using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).
On average, India performs a little over one million tests to determine Covid-19 daily. It has the capacity of performing at least 1.5 million tests in a day across 2,000 labs in the country.
One of the reasons for the increased scale of testing has the introduction of rapid antigen-based testing on June 14.
“Wherever mass deployment of tests is needed such as containment zones, migrant camps, quarantine centres, etc, rapid antigen tests come in handy. True positives are 100% confirmed, and for symptomatic negatives, ICMR has recommended repeating the test using RT-PCR for confirmation. The rule was also revised later for asymptomatic negatives asking this category of people to be monitored for a couple of days for symptoms, and those who show symptoms must be made to undergo a Covid-19 test. This way we manage to minimise the risk of missing infected cases,” said an ICMR official, who did not wish to be identified.
