The number of new daily cases has also come down to below 80,000 from the two-day peak of over 90,000

India has reached another milestone in COVID-19 testing by crossing five crore tests after conducting over 10 lakh tests in the past 24 hours.

According to data released by the government, in the past 24 hours, labs in India conducted 10,98,621 tests taking the total to 5,06,50,128 tests so far.

The data suggests that a 3.2 times expansion was seen since the third week of July when India could only conduct 3,26,971 tests daily to the first week of September when India was able to do over 10 lakh tests in a day.

In a statement, the government said, “India has come a long way from conducting just one test from the lab at National Institute of Virology, Pune in January 2020.”

The data further suggests that the Tests per Million has also increased with the setup of lab testing networks in the country. India has taken a long stride from doing 6,396 tests per million to conducting 36,703 tests per million today.

From just one lab at the Pune based National Institute of Virology in the starting days of the outbreak to having 1668 testing labs in the country. Out of these 1668, India has 1035 in the government sector while 633 labs have been set up in the private sector.

India has 846 Real-Time RT PCR based testing labs, 700 TrueNat based testing labs and 122 CBNAAT based testing labs.

Apart from that, India has also reported 73,521 recoveries in the past 24 hours which is higher than usual taking the recovery rate to over 77 per cent while the mortality rate is also hovering between one and two per cent, one of the lowest in the world.

The number of new cases has also come down to below 80,000 from the two-day peak of over 90,000. India has reported 75,809 fresh recoveries and 1133 new deaths in the past 24 hours.

So far, India has reported 42,80,422 cases out of which 33,23,950 patients have already recovered while 72,775 people have lost their lives.