K’taka ramps up Covid-19 testing capacity to 11,000 a day

Team Udayavani, May 23, 2020, 9:03 AM IST

Karnataka is conducting 11,449 tests in a single day and the number of daily tests has gone up by nearly 250% from 3,279 on April 22.

Day by day the number of cases has been increasing and government is now ramping up of testing capacity

K Sudhakar, Medical education Minister, said, “We had planned to increase the capacity to 10,000 tests per day by May 31. But we conducted 11,449 tests on Thursday, 10 days before the deadline. Karnataka has been managing the pandemic in a far better way than other states and is being hailed as a model state,”

“We are at a high level of testing, we are among the top five states in conducting the number of Covid tests per million population”, he added

It is said that the state has done  1.8 lakh Covid tests so far and a majority of the 36 laboratories are in Bengaluru

K Sudhakar said, “ Kalaburagi district, which recorded the country’s first Covid-19 death, conducted 1,142 tests on Thursday. Labs in Shivamogga and Mangaluru are also doing more tests. We have decided to increase the number of testing labs to 60 by the end of this month”