Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched the three high throughput COVID-19 testing facilities via video conferencing. These facilities are located at the National Institutes of Indian Council of Medical Research, at Kolkata, Mumbai and Noida. Prime Minister said that these hi-tech state-of-the-art testing facilities will boost the testing capacity by almost 10,000 daily tests. More number of tests will assist early detection and treatment, thereby helping fight the spread of the virus. He added that these labs will not be limited to testing for COVID, but in future, will also be able to test for Hepatitis B and C, HIV, Dengue and several other diseases.

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Prime Minister underlined that due to timely decisions taken by the government, India is better placed vis-a-vis other countries in terms of deaths due to COVID. The recovery rate is also higher than other countries and is improving on a daily basis. The total number of people who have recovered from the virus is about to reach 10 lakh.

Prime Minister said that it was imperative for the country to develop corona specific health infrastructure at a fast pace. He noted that the Centre had announced a package of Rs 15,000 crore at the beginning of this battle. The country now has more than 11,000 COVID facilities and more than 11 lakh isolation beds.

While the country had only one COVID testing centre in January, there are almost 1300 such labs now. He said that at present, more than 5 lakh tests are being conducted in the country daily, and efforts are underway to increase this capacity to 10 lakh in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, with a single-day increase of 47,703 COVID-19 cases, India's virus tally mounted to 14,83,156 on Tuesday, while the recoveries surged to 9,52,743 pushing the recovery rate to 64.24 per cent, according to the Union Health Ministry data. The country's death toll due to the virus rose to 33,425 with 654 deaths being reported in a 24-hour span, the data updated at 8 am showed. There are 4,96,988 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country presently.