Despite a spike in the coronavirus positive cases, the Uttar Pradesh government claimed that the situation was well under control as the recovery percentage was above 64 and the government planned to go for random sampling.
Additional Chief Secretary (Health) Amit Mohan Prasad said that there were 6,179 active cases in the state while 12,116 infected people had recovered and were discharged from hospitals.
“The silver lining in this scenario is that the recovery percentage of (COVID-19) patients is on the rise. UP has recorded 64.13 per cent recovery of the patients,” he said.
However, he expressed concern over the sudden rise in the number of coronavirus cases among people above 60 years of age.
“Earlier we had controlled the virus infecting people over 60 years, it being below 6 per cent, but now in the last two- three days it has reached 6.74 per cent,” he said and appealed to the people to protect the elderly persons .
The additional chief secretary said that the government was going for random testing of field workers in the state “On Monday, random tests were done on hawkers, vegetable sellers and others and today samples were collected of auto-rickshaw drivers, rickshaw-pullers and others in the same occupation,” he said.
Prasad said that there were 6,205 patients in the Covid isolation beds and 7,188 in the institutional quarantine. He said a total of 14,676 samples were tested on Monday in which 1,242 were pool tests of 5 samples and 102 pools tests of 10 samples.
He announced that within two to three days, the daily testing capacity would reach 20,000 and by the month end it would touch 25,000 per day.
The additional chief secretary said that the ASHA workers had screened 18,18,405 migrant workers in home quarantine and 1,523 were found with coronavirus symptoms. Of these 1,523 migrants, Covid tests were done on 1,206 in which 212 were found positive.