The number of coronavirus cases in India has breached the 42,000-mark. On Monday, the Ministry of Health updated the country’s Covid-19 tally at 42,553. 2,553 new infections and 72 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours in India.
At present, the country has 29,453 active coronavirus cases, 1,373 fatalities while nearly 12,000 patients (11,706) have recovered or have been discharged from hospitals across the country.
While the number of recovered coronavirus patients go up, India has also ramped up its testing capacity. The total number of coronavirus tests in India crossed the one million-mark on Saturday. India has achieved this feat by increasing the daily testing capacity by around five times within the last 40 days of lockdown.
“The ICMR has reached a per day testing level of about 70,000 and has conducted 10,40,000 tests till Saturday evening,” an ICMR official told news agency PTI.
Over 14,000 samples were tested in India on March 23, just before the imposition of the nationwide coronavirus lockdown, which rose to around 70,000 on May 1, a fivefold increase in per day testing, HT’s Hindi language publication, Live Hindustan reported. According to data, around 85% of Covid-19 tests have been carried out at government labs.
Till March 31, as many as 47,852 total samples were tested for coronavirus in the country. The figure rose to a total of 9,02,654 samples till April 30, PTI reported. From May 1 till Saturday evening, total 1,37,346 tests had been conducted across the country.
The Health Ministry hopes to achieve the capacity to perform one lakh tests daily by next week.
The third phase of nationwide coronavirus lockdown kicked-in on Monday with partial relaxations.
The lockdown restrictions and relaxations in various states will be based on the incidence of Covid-19. All districts of the country have been colour-coded into ‘red’, ‘orange’ and ‘green’ for the same.
