More on Covid-19

NEW DELHI: In a reassuring indicator of India’s fight against Covid-19, the rate of positive cases has ranged between 3-5% of the total of 1,30,000 samples tested so far over one and a half months without any substantial increase, the Indian Council of Medical Research said on Thursday.The positive rate will come across as more convincing with the government significantly ramping up testing in the last 10 days following identification of hotspots and high-risk zones and those tested including patients with serious flu or respiratory conditions.The stable rate of positive cases indicates that the rate of incidence is not rising too steeply even as overall numbers go up. The addition of 500-plus cases every day comes across as worrying and has led to the adoption of hotspot sealing. However, the rate of increase is not galloping as would be the case with a virulent community spread.Areas of high local incidence could be similar to community transmission but experts say it will require major clusters to develop in an area or city and for cases to move from one to the other for a stage-3 transmission.The government has already increased the sample size from 5,000 earlier this month to over 13,000 now. It has also approved a plan to deploy around 250 TrueNat machines and 200 CB-NAAT machines (more popular as GeneXpert) used for tuberculosis testing to check Covid-19 suspects.