The number of people being tested for Covid-19 in Meghalaya has come down by over 25 per cent in the days since the government began charging certain categories of people for their tests at state-run health facilities.
Apart from certain exceptions, government facilities have been charging Rs 500 for a Rapid Antigen Test and Rs 3,200 for RT-PCR, CBNAAT and TruNAT tests since the middle of this month.
In that time the average number of people being tested daily has been around 1,540 (for the days on which the Health Department provides the statistics to the press), while the daily average was over 2,000 in the days preceding this earlier in the month.
Infection rates, however, have come down even more drastically. In the first half of the month there were, on average, 170 new infections of Covid-19 recorded in Meghalaya every day. The second half of the month has seen this drop off by more than half to an average of 80 per day.
