NEW DELHI: India on Monday recorded another highest single-day spike for the fourth consecutive day with 6,977 new cases of Covid-19 confirmed within a span of 24 hours.
The total count of cases in India now stands at 1,38,845 with 4,021 deaths. A total of 154 of these deaths were reported on Monday.
Now, India is among the 10 worst-affected countries hit by the pandemic globally in terms of total confirmed cases.
The number of active cases has also been steadily rising and has now reached over 77,000. The Centre, however, has been maintaining that only a small fraction of patients have required ICU, oxygen or ventilator support so far even though there are reports from Mumbai that most hospitals are running out of ICUs and critical care beds for severely ill patients.
The Indian Council of Medical Research, the nodal agency for the outbreak, meanwhile, underlined that the country now has 610 total labs - 432 public, 178 private - and is currently testing more than 1.1 lakh samples for presence of infection every day.
It also said that the lab network has the existing capacity to test nearly 1.4 lakh samples per day, which is further being raised to 2 lakh samples.
The Council added that most states have been working with the National Tuberculosis Elimination Program to deploy TrueNAT machines for Covid-19 testing.
“Through this machine, testing is done in such areas/ districts where modern virological laboratory in private or public doesn’t exist; 6. Due to this, the testing infrastructure is not overwhelmed in any state to date,” said an ICMR statement on Monday.