The Union Health Ministry's war room and policy making team in New Delhi consists of the ministry's Emergency Medical Response Unit, the Central Surveillance Unit (IDSP), the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and experts from three government hospitals. They are part of policy decisions to decide how coronavirus should be tackled in the country. A cluster-containment strategy is mainly being adopted, similar to how India contained previous epidemics, as well as "breaking the chain of transmission". 15 labs across India led by the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, are testing for the virus, with more labs being trained, as of early March. On 13 March, 52 labs were named capable of virus testing.
On 14 March, scientists at the National Institute of Virology isolated a strain of the novel coronavirus. By doing so, India became the fifth country to successfully obtain a pure sample of the virus after China, Japan, Thailand and the US. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said that isolation of the virus will help towards expediting the development of drugs, vaccines and rapid diagnostic kits in the country. NIV has shared two SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences with GISAID. On 16 April, China sent 650,000 testing kits to India but their use was discontinued in view of a very low accuracy (of just 5.4%). In May, National Institute of Virology introduced another antibody test kit ELISA for rapid testing, capable of processing 90 samples in a single run of 2.5 hours.
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