India always a step ahead of COVID-19 curve: Govt

New Delhi, Apr 12: The health ministry on Sunday presented data to indicate that the country has been sufficiently scaling up its capacity in areas of testing, training and hospitalization to stay ahead of the curve of the disease.

"As of today, if we need 1,671 beds for Covid-19 patients, but we have over 1 lakh 5 thousand beds available," said Agarwal.

"We are increasing Covid-19 hospitals and isolation beds, this pandemic can result into an exponential rise in cases, which is why we are preparing in advance.

Continuous training of medical professionals to manage Covid-19 cases has been done at the national and the state level. We are over-prepared," he added.

The government's testing capacity had steadily increased to 219 labs including 68 from the private sector. He added that the average number of tests per day for the past five days has consistently been over the figure of 15,000.

"A total of 1,86,906 samples have been tested so far, of which 7,953 were found to be positive for Covid-19," said the ICMR official.

"14 identified institutes including AIIMS, NIMHANS to mentor medical colleges and expand COVID-19 testing capacity," Agarwal said.

A total of 8,447 positive cases have been recorded since the outbreak of the disease in the country. 909 additions registered since yesterday. A total of 273 deaths have been reported so far including 34 during the day. The good news, however, was the recovery of 716 positive cases.