Delhi has 72% recovery rate, over 20,000 Covid-19 tests done daily: Govt

A total of 35,780 tests were conducted per 1 million people till July 8 in the national capital, which has shown improvement in recent days with a recovery rate of over 72 per cent and a doubling rate of about 30 days, the Union Home Ministry said on Thursday.

"Till July 8, a total of 6,79,831 Covid-19 tests have been conducted in Delhi, that means 35,780 tests per 10 lakh people. Over 20,000 tests are being conducted daily in the national capital, said Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, Union Home Ministry addressing a press conference here.

As of July 10, Delhi has about 23,452 active cases and the recovery rate is over 72 per cent. The doubling rate is about 30 days in Delhi, Srivastava said.

"Many high-level meetings with states are being held by the Home Ministry to improve Covid-19 situation. To improve the situation in Delhi NCR, many important decisions have been taken in this regard. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Covid-19 Hospital in Delhi Cantonment emerged as the game-changer in the fight against Covid-19," she added.

Srivastava further said that more activities have been opened up outside containment zones as per Unlock 2 guidelines.

"It has now become essential to follow National Directives on Covid-19. MHA is continuously monitoring enforcement of these measures, in coordination with states," she said.

Meanwhile, Rajesh Bhushan, OSD, Ministry of Health said, "ICMR will soon conduct a sero surveillance survey for the country. In Delhi, 22,000 samples were taken under sero surveillance survey. Results will come soon."

The Union Health Ministry said today that despite a population of 1.3 billion people, India has been able to manage Covid-19 relatively well and the cases per million of the population in the country remains among the lowest in the world.

He said that we have 15 deaths per million population whereas we have countries where it is 40 times as much.

"Today we have 538 cases per million population. It is as per World Health Organization (WHO) situation report. Case per million population in some countries are at least 16-17 times more than what it is in India. We have 15 deaths per million population whereas we have countries where it is 40 times as much." Bhushan said.

ICMR Senior scientist Nivedita Gupta said, "The number of tests has increased, on an average, we are testing more than 2.6 lakh of samples per day. We hope to see a further rise by the use of the antigen test"

"ICMR has been continuing its efforts to ramp up Covid-19 testing capacity and outreach. TrueNat and CBNAAT tests too have been deployed recently, in addition to RT-PCR. A Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) has been validated and it is being used in containment zones and hospitals," she added.

India reported the highest single-day spike of 24,879 new positive cases and 487 deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of Covid-19 cases in the country to 7,67,296, according to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Out of the total number of cases, 2,69,789 are active, 4,76,378 have been cured/discharged/migrated and 21,129 have died.