India has significantly reduced its coronavirus testing, lowering its daily tally of reported cases, as the South Asian nation was poised to breach the threshold of 100,000 infections a day. In the past seven days, India carried out 7 per cent fewer tests than in the previous week, when it conducted more than 1m tests a day, said health economist Rijo M John, who teaches at the Indian Institute of Management in Kozhikode. India detected an all-time high of 97,859 new cases on September 16, as it was testing more than 1m. But tests have been dropping and on Saturday labs carried out 730,000 tests, down 30 per cent from the previous Saturday. India reported 87,392 cases on Sunday, based on the 730,000 tests the previous day, a positive rate of 12 per cent. The previous day India had detected more than 92,500 cases with more than 1.2m tests, a positivity rate of 8.8 per cent. India has nearly 5.5m confirmed infections and is adding more new cases than any other country.
More than 1,100 Indians are dying daily from Covid-19, with a total death toll of more than 87,900. It has relatively low coronavirus test rates compared with the other countries hardest hit by the virus. It carries out 46,500 tests per million population compared with nearly 300,000 tests per million in the US, and 70,500 per million in Brazil. The World Health Organization considers a positivity rate of below 5 per cent to be an indication that a country is testing adequately and is bringing the pandemic under control.
