More than 1.5 crore COVID-19 samples tested so far: Health ministry

New Delhi [India], July 24 (ANI): Close to 1.5 crore people have been tested for COVID-19 so far across the country, the Union Health Ministry said on Friday. It added that the testing has increased every day.
As per an official, a total of 3,52,801 samples were tested on July 23 across the country. Till date, 1,54,28,170 samples have been tested. Up till Friday, India was doing 11179.83 tests per million (TPM), which was a steady increase since the adoption of the 'Test Track and Treat' strategy.
"Recently, the WHO has issued a guidance note on public health criteria to adjust public health and social measures in the context of COVID-19. In this document, WHO underlines the need for comprehensive surveillance and testing of suspect cases and they further elaborated on the meaning of "comprehensive surveillance" by saying that if a country is testing 140 people per day per 10 lakh (one million) population. So, we are taking that indication from the WHO document. In the Indian context, there at least 22 states which are doing more than 140 tests per day per million population," an official of the health ministry told ANI.
He added that the government was conducting house to house surveillance, upgrading healthcare infrastructure and urged the citizens of the country to maintain social distancing, hand hygiene and wear masks to win the fight against coronavirus pandemic.
The surge in tests per million has been achieved with a steady rise in the number of laboratories, he added.
So far, the country has 1,290 dedicated labs to conduct COVID-19 tests. The RT-PCR labs are the backbone of the latest testing strategy prescribed by ICMR.
The number of labs in the public and private sectors has been increasing steadily. While, there are 897 labs in the government sector, 393 in the private sector. Till now there are 653 Real-Time RT PCR based testing, 530 TrueNat based testing labs, and 107 CBNAAT based testing labs. (ANI)