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The Uttar Pradesh government has asked chief medical officers to launch immunisation programme in their respective areas by the end of this week.
“Because of COVID-19 pandemic, the focus was shifted to prevention and protection of people from this dreaded disease due to which the immunisation programme was hampered. We have now asked the CMOs to start immunisation programme at the earliest,” Principal Secretary (Health) Amit Mohan Prasad said here on Wednesday.
He said that there had been delay of a month-and-half and according to experts it would not be much detrimental.
Talking about starting emergency services in selected hospitals, mostly private, Prasad said that training programme of the nodal officers of private hospitals was conducted on Wednesday on how to follow the protocol to prevent infection in hospitals.
“Now, these hospitals are authorised to commence the emergency services,” Prasad said.
However, he clearly stated that it was not compulsory for all patients admitted in the emergency to undertake COVID-19 test.
“Only those patients will be asked for the test who have the symptoms. Others will not be forced to undertake the test,” he said.
He said that pool tests were done in 12 labs and on Tuesday 332 pool tests of 1,612 samples only 15 were positive while the rest were negative.
A total of 73,716 samples have been sent for testing of which 2,134 were found positive while 70,436 were negative and results of 1,146 were awaited.
“On Wednesday, the department held a training programme for smart sample collections as per the guidelines of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). In the past we have observed that several samples were returned from the labs as they were not properly taken or preserved. The training was given for such things,” he added.