NEW DELHI : From just 100 covid-19 tests a day in January, India has ramped up its public and private diagnostics network to test over 600,000 samples a day to cross 20 million total tests on Sunday, as the coronavirus cases in the country neared 1.8 million, with over 38,000 deaths.After facing a lot of flak for not testing enough, the government gradually introduced a range of testing modalities, including reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the gold standard for testing covid-19.
India also expanded its testing strategy to include both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, and allowed different types of diagnostic kits, such as rapid antigen tests, antibody, TrueNat and CBNAAT (tuberculosis tests) and antigen.