In order to check the rise of COVID-19 cases in the state due to the festival season, the Uttar Pradesh government has decided to start the second phase of focus sampling tests in the targeted areas from November 19 to 30.
In this phase, the health teams will take random samples of the people and will try to identify the people with COVID-19 symptoms.
Additional Chief Secretary (Health) Amit Mohan Prasad said here on Wednesday that in the second phase of the focus sampling, every day the health teams would take samples from different segments of population throughout the state.
“The sectors which will be covered in this phase are urban slums, jails and temporary jails, children protection home, Nari Niketans, orphanage, old-age home, hawkers, government and private offices, markets and weekly markets. During this phase, random sampling will also be done in schools and colleges of teachers and other staff. After taking permission from the parents, the students could also be included in the tests,” Prasad said.
The first phase of random sampling was done before the Diwali festival which ended on November 13.
The WHO has appreciated the UP government’s effort in contact tracing and surveillance due to which the spread of COVID-19 has been contained to a large extent.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, UP reported 2,390 fresh COVID-19 cases taking the tally to 5,16,616. The recovery rate went up to 94.31 percent with 4,87,221 people recovering COVID-19, including 2,529 on Wednesday.
There are 21,954 active cases in the state out of which 9,672 are in home isolation, 2,163 in private hospitals and the rest in government-run Covid hospitals.
The death toll reached 7,441 on Wednesday evening with 29 fatalities during the past 24 hours.
At least 1,21,362 Covid tests were carried out on Tuesday. With this, the total Covid tests in the state reached 1,73,31,490, the highest in the country.
Around 4,56,186 surveillance teams have so far visited 2.79 crore houses in the state and have checked the health of over 14.77 crore people.