NEW DELHI: The Centre on Thursday indicated that the testing capacity could be ramped up by about five times than the existing capability in the coming weeks.
“We are looking to increase the testing capacity to 5 lakh per day by July,” said Dr V K Paul, member (health), Niti Aayog, who also heads the national task force on COVID-19 management.
He, however, did not elaborate on whether these will only be RTPCR tests or will also include antibody tests.
As of now, India has tested nearly 2,350 samples per million of which disease incidence was found to be nearly 110 per million.
For the last several days, the samples tested every day are nearly 1.1 lakh in over 600 government and private laboratories.
The total number of confirmed cases in India has reached 1,58, 333 with 4,531 deaths.
A few days back, the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had said that the country as of now has the capacity to test about 1.4 lakh samples per day, which is being raised to 2 lakh samples per day soon.
Most states have been working with National Tuberculosis Elimination Program (NTEP) to deploy TrueNAT machines for COVID-19 testing and more labs are being set up and additional machines are deployed in states like UP, Bihar, West Bengal as well as rest of the country to meet the possible higher requirement, the ministry had said.
India has significantly ramped up COVID-19 testing since the first test on January 24 at the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. Meanwhile, the government said the Indian pharmaceutical industries are trying their best to find a vaccine to beat the virus.
“The fight against coronavirus will be won through vaccines and drugs. Our country’s science and technology institutions and pharma industry are very strong,” said Dr Paul.