Even as the country witnessed a spike in novel coronavirus positive cases, Uttar Pradesh created a record of sorts by carrying out 1.78 lakh Covid tests on Tuesday and started mapping of fresh cases in 15 Covid prone districts of the State from Wednesday.
Additional Chief Secretary (health) Amit Mohan Prasad said on Wednesday that UP carried out the highest ever 1,78,549 Covid tests in a day on Tuesday and with this 1,84,70,887 samples were tested in the state so far, the highest by any state in the country.
“Of these Covid tests, 72,808 were by RT-PCR,” he said, adding that now the UP government had decided to go for a ratio of 40:60 in tests with 40 percent RT-PCR tests and rest 60 percent by rapid antigen and TrueNat methods.
Earlier one-third tests were by RT-PCR method and the rest two-thirds by rapid antigen kits.
At present, there are 24,876 coronavirus active cases in the state out of which 11,718 are in home isolation, 2,378 in private hospitals and the rest in government-run Covid hospitals.
Meanwhile, in a fresh decision, the UP government has asked 15 coronavirus-prone districts to go for mapping of the fresh cases detected between November 11 and 25.
“RT-PCR testing will be carried out in a random manner to break the coronavirus chain,” he said.
The 15 districts where mapping of the fresh cases has been started are Lucknow, Kanpur Nagar, Prayagraj, Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Meerut, Bareilly, Moradabad, Aligarh, Jhansi, Agra, Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar.
Prasad said the state government had also re-defined the containment areas after fresh cases started to spike. Now a single coronavirus positive case would have a containment area of 50 metres radius while in the case of cluster, it would be 100 metre radius.