New delhi sources stated that the total number of Covid 19 cases in india stands at 13,387 and the death toll at 414, the union health ministry said on Thursday. As many as 941 fresh cases and 37 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, Joint Secretary in the health Ministry Lav Agarwal said, adding 183 people have recovered and discharged during the same time period. The ministry said around 12.02 per cent have recovered and fatality rate is 3.3 per cent. "If our case fatality rate is 3.3 per cent then the percentage of people who have recovered so far is around 12.02 per cent," Agarwal said, addressing a daily briefing to give updates on COVID-19 situation in the country. Agarwal also said that 325 districts in india have not reported any coronavirus case so far because of actions initiated at field level.

The Head of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at ICMR, Dr Raman R Gangakhedkar, has said that india has received the much-awaited five lakh rapid COVID-19 testing kits from china today. He said these testing kits will be used for surveillance and to monitor whether coronavirus hotspots in the country are increasing or decreasing. Regarding concern over the efficacy of the rapid antibody testing kits, he said if an antibody test of a person turns out to be positive, one cannot necessarily be sure the person would not get infected ever again. "This means, even if antibody is present, that doesn't mean it will necessarily be effectively able to fight the virus."

Dr Gangakhedkare explained "Rapid antibody tests are for monitoring surveillance, not for diagnosis. Hence there is no concern with respect to the testing kits being faulty, that concern was with respect to immune response alone".  He said a total of 2,90,401 samples have been tested so far, of which 30,043 were tested on wednesday itself. Out of the tests carried out on wednesday, 26,331 were done in laboratories under indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) network and 3,712 in private labs.Commenting on the testing capacity of ICMR network, the official said "Working in one shift, more than 42,400 samples can be tested each day. If we work in two shifts, we will be able to test more than 78,200 samples daily."