India has carried out more than 1.1mn tests for the novel coronavirus, the country’s top medical research organisation said yesterday.
In a press statement, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said: “A total of 1,107,233 samples have been tested as on May 4, 9am.”
The Health Ministry said: “Our figures are being reconciled with ICMR.”
In addition to this, a Press Information Bureau tweet said: “India achieves a major milestone by crossing 1mn Covid-19 tests while clocking over 74,000 tests per day.”
Earlier, the PIB had said that the ICMR had crossed the benchmark of testing more than a million samples, which has been done only by a few countries across the world.
In other developments, young scientists of the National Centre For Biological Sciences (NCBS) have initiated a series of videos on social media to create awareness about Covid-19 in regional languages after Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed young scientists.
Modi had addressed the youth scientists of the nation regarding the creation of a vaccine.
The NCBS accepted the challenge immediately.
They also launched an initiative to release a video series in all Indian languages to inform people about ways to prevent the spread of the disease.
Manal Shakeel, a young research student who explained about the disease in Urdu, said: “We scientists explain what the virus is and how to stay safe from it in the videos. We also encourage people to ask  questions regarding it and also welcome suggestions. We have tried to bust many myths and false information being spread concerning this virus.”
Aditya Asopa, who started this idea with a series in Marwari, said “We are trying to build a way to do that - a source that can provide information in regional languages and understandable non-technical manner. In the grand scheme, this may become a source for popularising and communicating science.”
Meanwhile, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras-incubated startup is developing novel and scalable methods for coating textiles with nanoparticles-based antimicrobial agents that can inactivate the human coronavirus on contact, the institute said yesterday.
These coatings are expected to be effective up to 60 wash cycles, thereby making the textiles re-usable.
The coated textiles can be primarily used to manufacture N95 masks, surgical masks, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and food packaging bags, among others, with inherent properties of inactivating the virus.