Puducherry reached a COVID-19 milestone on Thursday when it became the country’s first Union Territory to test 10% of its population.
The Union Territory, which scaled up testing from about 1,500 samples a day a month ago to over 5,000 now, has in all tested 1,55,025 samples as on Thursday, with 1,25,215 of them returning negative.
The number of persons tested constitutes 10% of the 15 lakh population in the Union Territory.
The sustained increase in testing and a qualitative shift in surveillance has been central to the Union Territory’s success in lowering the test positivity rate to less than 10% now from 35% to 45% three weeks ago.
On Thursday, it logged 668 new cases from 5,945 tests at a positivity rate of about 11%.
“Among the key factors are strengthening of health manpower and the calibration of containment and active surveillance strategy that enabled detection and…