E-Paper
Coronavirus latest update: 39,980 cases hide a success story of India’s Covid-19 fight
India is hoping to be able to conduct 100,000 RT-PCR tests a day within a week’s time.
The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) on Sunday highlighted India’s relative success in the containing coronavirus outbreak by claiming the country had the least number of positive Covid-19 cases among countries that had conducted one million tests. India crossed that milestone on Saturday, thanks to a continuous up-gradation in its testing capacity.
As on Sunday, India had registered a total of 39,980 positive cases of the virus, which was about half of the cases registered in Germany, one-third of cases in Turkey, one-fourth of Italy and the USA and nearly one-fifth of Spain, when these countries completed one million RT- PCR tests.
According to a bar graph reportedly compiled using ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) data, Germany had 73,522 positive cases on the day it completed 1 million RT-PCR tests. Germany is one of the few countries with a high infection rate but a low mortality rate from the virus.
Other major countries like Turkey (117,589), Italy (152,271), USA (164,620) and Spain (200,194) have even worse figures of total infections per million tests.
The comparison suggests that the rate of spread of coronavirus in India was far less than the above-listed countries that are amongst the worst affected in the world. While the BJP didn’t specify any reason for this, the government has often credited nationwide lockdown, suspension of international and intra-national travel and other restrictions for slowing down the growth rate of the virus in the country.
India has steadily ramped up its testing capacity from 5,580 a day on April 1 to 74,507 samples on May 2. The health ministry expects to cross 100,000 tests a day by the next week.
The number of labs in the country conducting Covid-19 tests has gone up to 406, including 105 private facilities.
The HT Guide to Coronavirus COVID-19
In terms of population, India has conducted almost 783 tests per million. This ratio continues to be on the lower side since other countries with far less population have a better score on this count. Germany has done 30,400 tests per million, Turkey has done 13,177 tests per million, Italy has done 34,879 tests per million, USA has done 20,940 tests per million and Spain has done 32,699 tests per million as of Sunday. India has the lowest tests/million of population among the top 20 countries worst affected by the disease.
