HYDERABAD: Telangana now has the second-lowest Covid-19 testing rate in the country. According to a list of states, arranged in descending order based on the number of Covid-19 tests they had conducted per million population, released by NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant late on Saturday night, Telangana is just above the bottom-placed Bihar. According to the list, the number of tests per million in Telangana was a meagre 2,637. The highest number of tests per million was conducted by Delhi with 32,863 tests.
A simple comparison between Telangana, which just a few days ago crossed the figure of one lakh tests, and Assam, which is looking to cross five lakh tests in coming few days, clears the air regarding efforts taken by Telangana over the past two months to increase testing capacity. According to data released by the ICMR earlier, Telangana was conducting 475 tests per million by April-end, whereas in Assam the number was around 228 tests per million.
While Telangana managed to increase testing by around six fold to 2,637 tests per million, Assam increased its testing by around 60 fold to 13,471. Assam has the same number of RT-PCR labs as Telangana but it also started conducting Covid-19 tests using rapid antibody testing kits and has been rapidly increasing its testing capacity. Telangana, on the other hand, neither increased the RTPCR labs in the State nor acquired additional TrueNat machines, like Andhra Pradesh managed to do. In fact, the sibling State of Andhra Pradesh conducted the second highest tests per million at 18,597.
While Andhra Pradesh has 54 government testing labs, which include 11 RT-PCR labs and 43 TrueNat labs, Telangana has just 14 government testing labs of which 10 are RTPCR labs and four are TrueNat laboratories. Moreover, Telangana even criticised the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for change in its stance towards testing and other states resorting to using antibody testing. However, as Express reported recently, Telangana itself is now looking to procure rapid antibody testing kits to conduct 50,000 tests and IgG ELISA testing kits for 10,000 tests.