'Half of Delhi tested for Covid-19'

New Delhi: With vaccination having started and Delhi consistently reporting a low number of fresh COVID-19 cases, the Capital on Wednesday crossed the milestone of 1 crore COVID-19 tests since the outbreak of the virus. The city's population as per the last census was about 1.9 crore.

Officials here said that total tests in the city had reached 1,00,59,193 after having conducted over 63,000 tests on Tuesday, which resulted in 228 fresh cases being reported on Wednesday. The health bulletin added that 10 more people had succumbed to the contagious disease.

Boasting of the milestone, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday tweeted, "Delhi sets a new record! We have conducted over 1 crore Corona tests to date, equivalent to 50% of Delhi's population. With a focus on increased testing & treatment, Delhi has successfully contained the scale & spread of Corona infection."

On Monday, the city had recorded 161 cases, the lowest in nearly nine months, with a positivity rate of 0.32 per cent.

The infection tally in the city stood at over 6.33 lakh and the death toll mounted to 10,774 with the new fatalities, the authorities said on

Wednesday.

These 228 new cases came out of the 63,161 tests conducted the previous day, including 32,957 RT-PCR tests and 30,204 rapid antigen tests, according to the latest bulletin issued by the Delhi Health Department.

The number of tests per million was over 5.2 lakh as of Tuesday, while the cumulative figure crossed the one-crore mark.

While testing has been a bugbear for the Capital, it had dramatically scaled up testing facilities as and when the city saw its peaks. During the first wave of the pandemic, the Delhi government was testing around 10,000 samples a day, following which when cases increased, testing was doubled. The situation was somewhat brought under control until the second wave when cases surged further and testing was increased to around 40-50,000 a day. But the third wave of the pandemic prompted by the festive season had resulted in the city going all out to test close to 1 lakh people a day.

Interestingly, on two of these occasions, testing was increased after an intervention from the Union Home Ministry, which had helped increase the number of testing centres.

This month, 585 cases were reported on January 1; 494 on January 2; 424 on January 3; 384 on January 4; 442 on January 5; 654 on January 6; 486 on January 7; 444 on January 8; 519 on January 9; 399 on January 10; 306 on January 11; 386 on January 12; 357 on January 13 and 340 on January 14.

From January 15-18, the daily figures stood at 295; 299; 246 and 231 respectively.

The active cases tally on Wednesday dropped to 2,147 from 2,334 the previous day, while the positivity rate was 0.36 per cent.

The bulletin said the total number of coronavirus cases has climbed to 6,33,049, while the recovery rate was over 97 per cent.

According to the Wednesday bulletin, out of the total number of 9,200 beds in COVID hospitals, 8,232 are vacant.

The bulletin said 6,20,128 patients have recovered, been discharged or migrated out of the city so far.