Indian Institute of Science, India's premier advanced science and technology research institute has developed unique Mobile Vans for testing COVID 19 and provides accurate results, within 4 to 12 hours. An end to end testing solution called mobile infection testing and Reporting MITR has been developed at the IISc incubated startup called ShanMukha innovations.

MITR is India's first and only Biosafety level two plus compliant mobile diagnostic lab approved by the ICMR . The mobile labs allow healthcare workers to collect, process, and test samples using RT-PCR onsite and upload results directly to the ICMR portal.The mobile lab can conduct upto 9,000 tests per month.

IISc handed over these labs to the government of Karnataka which will deploy it in the containment zones and Corona hotspot areas quickly to scale up the testing facility by the govt.

Director of IISc Prof Govindarajan, handed over the vans to the state Medical education minister Dr. K Sudhakar on Wednesday.ShanMukha Innovations and IISc trained three staffers to operate the mobile unit. The three-vehicle system costs about Rs 1.5 crore and had been built through CSR funding. 

The IISc said the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Central government played a key role in facilitating CSR support for the endeavor. Contributions were received from Tata Motors for two mobile vans. Additional funding was received from Collins Aerospace and Borqs software solutions.

Meanwhile, as of Wednesday morning, the total number of cases stood at 18,540,119 and the fatalities rose to 700,647, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed in its latest update.

The US accounted for the world's highest number of infections and fatalities at 4,771,080 and 156,801, respectively, according to the CSSE.

Brazil came in the second place with 2,801,921 infections and 95,819 deaths.In terms of cases, India ranks third (1,908,254), and is followed by Russia (859,762), South Africa (521,318), Mexico (449,961), Peru (439,890), Chile (362,962 ), Colombia (334,979), Iran (314,786), the UK (307,256), Spain (302,814), Saudi Arabia (281,456), Pakistan (280,461), Italy (248,419 ), Bangladesh (244,020), Turkey (234,934), France (228,576), Argentina (213,535), Germany (212,828), Iraq (134,722), Canada (119,659), Indonesia (115,056), Philippines (112,593) and Qatar (111,538), the CSSE figures showed.

The other countries with over 10,000 deaths are the Mexico (48,869), UK (46,295), India (39,795), Italy (35,171), France (30,297), Spain (28,498), Peru (20,007), Iran (17,617), Russia (14,327) and Colombia (11,315).