India to increase testing capacity to 100,000 per day soon: Harsh Vardhan

As total coronavirus deaths crossed the 1,000 mark and total confirmed cases reached 31,787, the Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said that the government is working to increase the testing capacity to 100,000 tests per day within the next few days. 

As on Wednesday, India had conducted a total of 770,764 tests. More than 1,800 new confirmed cases got added to the total tally, since Tuesday evening. 

Currently, 288 government laboratories are working along with 97 private labs chains with around 16,000 sample collection centres and around 60,000 tests per day. 

“The ministry of science & technology, under my charge, has also been working on innovations and have been funding certain projects which are going to make the testing procedure quite fast,” Vardhan said. He was addressing a video conference with the members of Lion Club International. 

The health ministry has also pushed its integrated disease surveillance programme (IDSP), a nation-wide surveillance system for epidemic prone diseases, strengthening it with “substantive digital inputs,” health minister said. 

He said that since the last three days the doubling rate of Covid-19 cases has slowed to 11.3 days in the country, with a mortality rate of 3 per cent against the global average of 7 per cent. 

Close to 40 per cent of the total deaths are in Maharashtra where 400 have died of Corona, so far. 

According to the health ministry, 0.33 per cent patients are on ventilators, 1.5 per cent patients are on oxygen support and 2.34 per cent patients are in ICU. 

The health minister said that India has successfully tackled public health emergencies of international concern and pandemics in the past as well. “Our nation has the requisite national core capacities stipulated in the international health regulations to manage public health emergencies,” he added. 

Vardhan said that India had maintained a continuous situation awareness, with preemptive and proactive approach and followed a graded response as per continuously evolving scenario to tackle Covid-19 pandemic.