This is straight from the Ripley's Believe it or not. In the ongoing Covid tests, one mobile phone number was used for registration of 7,343 tests and all of them tested negative.

This happened in Bareilly from January to March 31.

This fraud speaks volumes about how some paramedics are ramping up the test numbers to be on the good books of the officials. The government claims that over two lakh Covid tests are carried out daily. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said that half of these tests should be RT-PCR.

The fraud came to light when the mobile phone number 70197xxx31 was accidently keyed in on the Covid portal during random checking. The officers were shocked to see 7,343 tests carried out on this number. Majority of these were antigen tests while a few were RT-PCR tests too. The reports of all these tests were negative.

An official said that there was pressure on the medical staff to carry out an allotted number of Covid tests every day.

"Some of the paramedics found a better way to meet the target by using one mobile phone number for registration and showed the result as negative," the official said and added that the paramedics who carried out the test was intelligent enough to give a negative report because a positive report meant that patient had to be hospitalised and this would have exposed him.

The paramedic involved in this fraud has been identified.

This is not the first time such an incident has been reported. Earlier, a health worker was caught on camera collecting the swab of a doctor multiple times to boost the test numbers.