Twenty-five districts across 15 states which had detected COVID-19 infections earlier have contained the spread and reported no new cases in 14 days, the Union Health Ministry said on Monday.
The ministry asserted that the government has enough stocks to conduct tests for up to six weeks and over 200,000 samples have been tested so far.
Addressing a press briefing here, Lav Agarwal, joint secretary at the federal health ministry, said 796 new COVID-19 cases and 35 deaths have been reported in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of cases to 9,152 and deaths 308.
“Twenty-five districts across 15 states which had reported cases earlier have contained the virus and have not detected new ones in 14 days. This is a positive development,” he said.
Agarwal also said that the Core Strategy Group on COVID-19 was working on rapid and economical diagnostics as well as new drugs.
“The group has been formed, based on a detailed review of COVID-19 research, undertaken by Union Health Minister Harshvardhan along with CSIR and its 38 labs. The group is working on digital and molecular surveillance, rapid and economical diagnostics, new drugs, repurposing of drugs and associated production processes,” he said.
According to ICMR officials, 2,06,212 tests for COVID-19 have been conducted so far.
“Of these 14,855 tests took place at 156 government labs and 1,913 tests happened at 69 private labs on Sunday. There is no need to worry. We have enough stocks to conduct tests for six weeks,” an ICMR official said at the briefing.
