The Uttar Pradesh government engaged state aircraft to cart modern coronavirus testing machines to do away with delays and increase testing facilities across the state.

“State aircraft was used to bring 21 TrueNet machines from Mumbai. They will now be sent to districts for testing people with COVID-19 symptoms,” said Principal Secretary (Health) Amit Mohan  Prasad on Monday .

The principal secretary said the remaining 34 TruNet machines would also be brought by state planes from Mumbai so that they could be set up in far flung districts to increase testing capacity.

“On the directive of the chief minister, the state aircraft is being used so that machines are set up without delay as transporting them by road from Mumbai could take at least a week,” he said .

Earlier, 20 TrueNet machines were installed in districts last month due to which the testing capacity went up to 10,000 per day. The state government has set a target to double the testing to 20,000 tests per day by June-end.

The state labs tested 8,642 samples on Sunday, including 847 pool tests of five samples and 111 pool tests of 10 samples each. In five-sample pool tests, 100 people were found to be positive and in 10-sample pool tests, 20 were found positive for coronavirus infection.

Talking about the people admitted in Covid isolation wards, Prasad said that 3,141 people were being treated and of them 60 were on oxygen support and four had to be put on ventilator.

He said 8,472 people were in quarantine and waiting for their report.

During tracking of home quarantined migrant workers, ASHA workers found 1,027 with coronavirus symptoms. More than 11.47 lakh migrant workers have been tracked so far .

Similarly, Aarogya Setu App alerted 59,823 people in the state out of which 127 were found positive and hospitalised. Of them, 55 have recovered, 1,479 are in quarantine centres and 46 are awaiting their test results.