Ghaziabad starts testing for Covid at railway station

Ghaziabad: In view of the surge in Covid-19 cases in states such as Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, the district health department on Monday started conducting of tests of passengers coming from such states at the Ghaziabad railway station

Ghaziabad: In view of the surge in Covid-19 cases in states such as Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, the district health department on Monday started conducting of tests of passengers coming from such states at the Ghaziabad railway station.

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Health officials said that they will conduct both the rapid antigen tests and the RT-PCR tests for the passengers arriving at Ghaziabad from the states having high incidence of Covid-19 cases.

“We have deployed a team that will conduct random tests for 10-15% of passengers from states like Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab and Chhattisgarh. The railway authorities have also been requested to provide us a list of such passengers so that they can be screened at their homes as well. We will carry out rapid antigen tests for symptomatic cases, while random RT-PCR tests will also be taken up,” said Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer.

The officials said that during the past 10 days, about 122 positive cases were detected in the district and 35 of their 1,488 contacts were found positive.

According to the state Covid-19 bulletin, Ghaziabad on Monday reported seven new cases, taking the overall tally to 26,887 which include 102 deaths. At present, the district has 105 active cases while 26,692 patients recovered since March last year.

The officials have also asked the members of various ‘nigrani samitis’ to inform the district Covid command and control centre about people coming in from high incidence states. The district has 286 such samitisin urban areas and another 182 in rural areas to keep an eye on persons having Covid-like symptoms.

Gupta said that about 30 people from different states were tested during past one month and all were found negative for Covid-19.

“Besides the random testing of passengers from the high incidence states, we will also take up random testing of other passengers as well. We have also received directions from the state officials to increase our daily testing target. For this, we have formed five more teams, and now we have a total of 25 teams taking up testing and surveillance,” the CMO said.

The Ghaziabad district is already assigned a target of conducting 3500 rapid antigen tests and 1700 RT-PCR tests per day. The officials said that the daily average of tests is about 2200 in the first fortnight of March and low since cases declined considerably during winters.

“As a result, their contacts also declined, and it also affected daily testing. Now, we are focussing more on RT-PCR tests and will try to achieve the daily target of 1700 tests per day,” Gupta added.

District magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey did not respond to calls.

According to railway officials, there are about 175 different trains which stop at Ghaziabad railway station. “Before the lockdown last year, the Ghaziabad railway station catered to about 300 trains, including the local EMU trains. The average daily footfall at present is about 8,000-10,000, which was about 50,000 during pre-lockdown period,” said a railway official at the Ghaziabad station.

In a statement issued on Monday, the Union ministry of health and family welfare said that five states of Maharashtra, Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu continue to report a surge in the daily new Covid cases. They cumulatively accounted for 78.41% of the 26,291 new cases reported in the past 24 hours across the country, as per the statement.

“A rising trajectory of daily new cases is visible in eight states. These are Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka and Haryana. Kerala has a consistently declining trend over last one month,” the statement further said.