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Four months on, Gautam Budh Nagar DM says surge in cases due to better testing
NOIDA:
NOIDA:
On Wednesday, the Gautam Budh Nagar completed four months since the first Covid-19 positive case was reported in the district.
From just about one positive case a day in March, the district now sees around 92 cases per day in the first week of July alone.
District magistrate Suhas LY said that the rising number of cases with less than 1% fatality rate indicated better testing and treatment. The recovery rate in the district is about 67%.
“We are focusing on containment as well as early treatment. We have increased our testing multifold. Antigen testing kits are being used for large scale testing every day. In the last six days, over 14,000 tests have been done, including around 9,000 antigen kit tests and nearly 5,000 RT-PCR tests. Because of this, positive case numbers have definitely gone up, but it has helped us in containment and isolation of positive cases, thereby reducing positivity rate,” he said.
The DM further said that testing includes Covid-19 contacts, high risk persons in containment zones, symptomatic patients and others. “We shall continue with the intensive screening and testing, till the infection of deadly virus ends,” he said.
Over 1,500 teams have been formed of health and other departmental workers. “These teams are visiting households and identifying high risk groups, persons with symptoms of Covid-19. These teams are carrying thermal screening equipment and pulse oximeters for oxygen saturation monitoring. The better we do our comorbidity management, lesser will be our mortality rate. We have also requested different residents’ welfare associations and local panchayats, to actively participate in this fight against the coronavirus,” he said.
He further said that the Covid-19 facilities of different levels are continuously being ramped up. “The district, at present, has around 1,100 active cases. But, we are ready with over 3,000 beds. Not only that, based on the feedback given by the cured patients, we are making improvement in the hospitals – where they had been admitted,” he said.
He also said that the 24X7 call centre 18004192211 continue to be at residents’ service for scheduling tests and positive declaration/bed request. “Our portal tinyurl.com/GBN-COVID-HELP is also actively disposing off public health related grievances. We believe, there is always scope for improvement in delivery of services and we shall strive to do better,” he said and appealed the people for self-regulation, awareness and protocol adherence.
