Remove bottlenecks on testing: Congress tells Modi

Congress on Sunday renewed the demand to scale up testing for COVID-19, with Rahul Gandhi asking Prime Minister Narendra Modi to clear the bottlenecks in this regard.

“Experts agree that mass random testing is the key to beating coronavirus. In India, a bottleneck is stopping us from scaling testing from the current 40,000 per day to 1 lakh tests a day, for which test kits are already in stock. PM needs to act fast & clear the bottleneck,” Gandhi said on Twitter on Sunday.

Congress has been insisting on ramping up testing for COVID-19, claiming that the lower number of cases was mainly a result of inadequate testing. However, scientists at the Indian Council of Medical Research have been maintaining that it was testing every person who needs to be tested for infection and the lower numbers were a good augury.

Addressing a press conference through video link, senior Congress leader Manish Tewari wondered whether the limited number of RNA extraction kits was the reason for low testing in the country.

“We have been told that there are only three lakh RNA extraction kits left and soon we will exhaust them,” Tewari said and sought to know from the government how many kits have been imported over the past six days.

Congress also stepped up pressure on the government to spell out its national plan for dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak as an absence of a plan would prove to be a handicap for the state governments to formulate their response in tackling the situation.

India has a death rate of 3.06 per cent due to coronavirus. On the brighter side, 5,914 persons have recovered from the disease and discharged from hospitals, pegging the recovery rate at 21.97 per cent.