Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday remotely inaugurated three high-throughput Covid testing machines, capable of testing 10,000 samples a day in northern, western and eastern parts of the country as the total number of Covid cases in India crossed 14 lakh.

Apart from augmenting current Covid testing capacity, these facilities, installed at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) laboratories in Noida, Mumbai and Kolkata, would be a stepping stone towards taking the total number of daily Covid tests to 1 million subsequently and can also be used for detecting other viral diseases, including hepatitis, HIV and dengue in the future, the Prime Minister said. India currently conducts more than 5 lakh covid tests a day.

He said India has come a long way in preparing itself to fight the deadly virus. While there was only one testing facility in January, there are nearly 1,300 across the country today. Similarly, the country, which was not producing a single personal protection equipment (PPE) before Covid started, has now 12,000 manufacturers producing 5 lakh PPE kits. The same is the case with N-95 masks, Modi said, adding that the current production capacity per day is 3 lakh N-95 masks.

A fund of ₹15,000 crore set aside by the government has helped the country to set up 11,000 Covid facilities with 11 lakh isolation beds. Modi hoped that villages across the country will soon have public and private health centres for detecting and treating Covid patients.

Case fatality rate

Earlier in the day, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that the Covid case fatality rate (CFR) in the country has been falling progressively and it now stands at 2.28 per cent. In other words, out of every 100 covid infections, only 2.28 persons are succumbing to it. India’s CFR is one of the lowest in the world, the ministry said.

As on Monday morning, there are a total of 14,35,453 Covid cases, of which 4,85,114 are currently active infections. While 9,17,568 people have recovered, 32,771 persons have succumbed to death.

For the fourth day, the number of people recovered from Covid-19 was more than 30,000. In the last 24 hours, 31,991 patients have been discharged from hospitals. This has taken the total recoveries beyond 9 lakh, helping recovery rate move up to 64 per cent.

India currently has a doubling rate of 22.5 days and an incidence per million of 933.3, according to officially available information. It is currently testing 11,180 samples per million.

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