India inching towards 3.5-lakh Covid cases

ICRM says India now has the capacity to test up to 3-lakh samples per day.

As confirmed Covid-19 cases in India inched towards the 3.5- lakh mark, many States, including those having high disease burden such as Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, reached an agreement with private hospitals to make sure that they would provide in-patient treatment at reasonable rates.

As on Tuesday, there are 3,43,091 Covid-19 cases in the country, of which, nearly 1,80,000 recovered and 9,900 died, according to data available from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW). India is now consistently recording cases between 10,000 and 11,000 daily.

Critical care
As the cases rise rapidly, the Ministry has pointed out that Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh have already negotiated and reached an agreement with the private sector to provide critical care for in-patient Covid-19 admissions at reasonable rates.

The number of tests conducted each day is being augmented, too. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said India now has the capacity to test up to 3-lakh samples per day. In the last 24 hours, half of this capacity was utilised with as many as 1,54,935 samples tested in a day. In five months, up to 59,21,069 samples have been tested in all.

While the national capital was recently caught in the eye of a storm, as the Supreme Court had pulled it up for low testing, the Ministry has clarified that Delhi currently has the capacity to test up to 17,000 samples per day in 42 labs. Delhi has a total of 42,829 cases, that include 16,427 recovered patients and another 1,400 died. It is now next only to Tamil Nadu, which has recorded 46,504 cases and Maharashtra 1,10,744 cases.

The remote Union Territory of Ladakh, which had 103 cases until June 8, recorded up to 239 cases on June 13, which escalated to 437 on June 14 and spiked up to 555 on June 16. Only 82 persons have recovered and one has died, leading the hilly UT to be the latest region registering the Covid-19 spike. – The Hindu BusinessLine