THE number of Covid-19 tests conducted last week dipped by 7% to 713,226, compared with the number for the previous week.

According to the Ministry of Health’s weekly report, an average of 101,889 tests were conducted a day in the week under review.

The positivity rate for last week stood at 7.3%, which is an increase of 0.3% from the previous week.

Meanwhile, on a separate note, the ministry said in a Facebook post that the delays were from private labs not under its control.

“The common issue encountered by the ministry is that private labs tend to be late in keying in the data of the negative results into the public health laboratory information system, especially on holidays,” the ministry said.

“The positive cases are announced quickly. Nevertheless, the number of daily cases is in line with the World Health Organization’s yardstick and the number of negative results could be more than reported,” it added.

The ministry said, according to this yardstick, the ratio of positive cases to negative vases should be 1:10. Ideally it should be 30 negative cases for every one positive case.

The ministry is also fine tuning the recording process for RTK-Ag test results conducted at home.

According to infographics uploaded to the Facebook post, between May 26 and June 8, the number of daily tests conducted ranged between 72,695 on June 7 and 125,341 on May 28.

This consisted of both the RT-PCR and RTK Antigen test.

Consultant paediatrician Dr Amar Singh HSS recently said that it was meaningless to say that the number of positive Covid-19 cases were on the decline when insufficient testing was being conducted.

“Telling us the daily case numbers are coming down without adjusting for testing numbers or test positivity is meaningless,” the doctor said in a tweet.

“Cases will come down if we test less. Test positivity remains high. Too few tests for a huge outbreak.”

According to Amar’s calculations, test positivity has ranged between 6.5% and 7.9% for the period between May 29 and June 7. – June 9, 2021.