The World Health Organisatiion (WHO) has advised comprehensive surveillance for suspected COVID-19 cases. While explaining the concept of comprehensive surveillance and testing of suspect cases, WHO advises that a country needs 140 tests per day per million population.
The WHO advisory on testing was issued in its Guidance Note on “Public Health Criteria to Adjust Public Health and Social Measures in the Context of COVID-19”.
Altogether, 22 states and UTs in India are already conducting 140 and more tests per day per million. States and UTs are being regularly advised to increase the testing capacity to match the WHO advised levels of testing, the Health and Family Welfare Ministry stated in a release on Wednesday.
The growing network of labs for testing of COVID-19 has helped in increasing the numbers of COVID-19 tests in the country.
Today, the country has 865 labs in the government sector and 358 private labs, and the total number of testing labs is 1223, as on date.
In addition to the gold standard for test, RT PCR, TrueNat and CBNAAT are also used to augment this facility.
- Real-Time RT PCR based testing labs: 633 (Govt: 391 + Private: 242)
- TrueNat based testing labs: 491 (Govt: 439 + Private: 52)
- CBNAAT based testing labs: 99 (Govt: 35 + Private: 64)
The expansion of laboratory capacity has seen exponential increase from one lab in January 2020 to 121 labs in March 2020 and to 1,223 labs today.
In the last 24 hours since Tuesday, 3,20,161 samples have been tested. The cumulative number of samples tested, as of now is 1,24,12,664.
The testing per million for India has now touched 8994.7. On July 14, 2020, more than 3.2 lakh tests were done on a single day countrywide, according to the Health and Family Welfare Ministry.
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