<span style="color: #222222;">India is continuously stepping up it's COVID testing capacity. </span><br />'' <br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">In the last 24 hours, more than 8. 20 lakh samples were tested taking the cumulative testing numbers till date to over 3 crore 76 lakh 51 thousand.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">The Covid positivity rate continues to record decline despite increased testing and stands at a weekly average of around 8 per cent of the total samples tested.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">Tests done per million of the population in the country has also scaled new peak of being over 27,000.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">The Union Health Ministry informed that the remarkable feat has been achieved by rigorously following the "Test, Track and Treat" strategy.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">ICMR said that the indigenous production of testing kits in the country has brought down the cost incurred on single RT-PCR test from around Rs. 2,000 to nearly Rs. 300.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">The week-wise average daily tests conducted has also witnessed a sharp increase from around 2.3 lakh in the first week of July 2020 to over 8 lakh in the current week.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">Government said that the strong determinant of this milestone has been a sustained expansion of testing labs across the country.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">From merely one lab in January this year, the country today has 1,540 labs. </span><br />'' <br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">Out of these, 92 are government labs while the remaining 548 are private.</span><br />''