karnataka Medical education minister K sudhakar on saturday had announced that the state has surpassed the ‘landmark’ of 1 lakh tests for COVID-19 since march 8 when the first case was detected in the state. A total of 1,07,311 samples have been tested so far, out of which 5,068 were tested on saturday alone, the state health department said in its bulletin on sunday evening. With the “landmark” of 1 lakh tests reached, here’s a look at how other indian states are faring. Among neighbouring states, only kerala (36,648) has reported a lesser number of tests so far while the number of tests done in telangana is not known as the numbers have not been made public. While tamil Nadu has tested 2,29,670 samples, andhra pradesh and maharashtra have done 1,65,069 and 2,27,804 tests respectively. However, experts have noted that the test numbers should ideally be compared in terms of tests done with respect to how large the population of the state or country is.
Speaking on this, Dr CN Manjunth, state nodal officer for testing, said, “Random testing has to be done both in containment zones and also green zones. If we can do a substantial number of random tests in green zones and if they come back negative, then we can open up those areas fully. Otherwise, if there are random tests in which results come back as positive, it might suggest that community transmission has taken place. So there is no alternative to testing a significant part of the population. Considering all this, we are not doing bad and we will significantly improve by month-end.”
Among large indian states with populations of over 1 crore, karnataka stands eighth in the count of tests done per million of population. While delhi is the best with 5027 persons tested per million, karnataka has tested 1687 persons per million. andhra pradesh (3330/million), kashmir - SRINAGAR/JAMMU' target='_blank' title='jammu and kashmir-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW'>jammu and kashmir (2495/million), tamil Nadu (2423/million), rajasthan (1967/million), maharashtra (1870/million) and gujarat (1816/million) are the other states with better testing ratio. india as a whole now has a testing rate of 1263 per million.
