Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said that from today onwards, the state department shall be eyeing to conduct a minimum of 1 lakh coronavirus tests per day.
As per media reports, the state government, in its bid to arrest the spread of the pathogen, is now planning to conduct 60,000 tests per million tests by the end of the month.
Sarma has said that the state government plans to complete a large number of tests per million by the end of August. This, he opined, shall enable the health department to separate the COVID-19 positive persons from the rest of society and prevent the situation from spiraling further out of control.
At the same time, Sarma has placed great emphasis on ramping up the number of tests and taking the figure closer to a lakh. Assam has so far conducted nearly 14 lakh tests, with the daily average hovering around the 60,000-case mark. Sarma’s emphasis on raising the number of tests echoes the sentiment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who in a meeting today with the Chief Ministers of several states said that testing is one of the keys to defeating the dreaded virus.