COVID-19 : Is Karnataka testing enough people?

Although Karnataka has been maintaining a test positivity rate (TPR) of below 1% for the past two months, the number of daily tests have reduced to below 70,000. While health officials said that a daily target of 75,000 tests has been fixed and that district officials have been told to ramp up testing, the number of tests have hovered around 60,000 per day in the last one month. The number of tests rose to 76,799 on Friday after a long time. In fact, the number of tests started falling after the rollout of COVID-19 vaccination on January 16. From over one lakh a day, the number hovered around 90,000 till January-end. This further reduced to 50,000 in the first week of February when the State, based on recommendations of the COVID-19 Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), fixed a target of 75,000 tests per day. The numbers have slightly gone up in the last one week, hovering around 65,000.