E-Paper
Uttar Pradesh achieves milestone of 5 crore Covid-19 tests
On Tuesday, the Uttar Pradesh government launched an ambitious Covid-19 vaccination campaign, in which the administration aims to inoculate 1 crore people in a month.
Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday crossed a significant milestone of testing five crore samples for coronavirus disease (Covid-19). In a release, the state government said that Uttar Pradesh is the first state to cross the milestone.
It also said that on an average, three lakh Covid-19 tests are being conducted across the state daily.
The state government said that 3,31,511 said were tested in the last 24 hours, out of which nearly 1,500 tested positive. The share of RT-PCR test - considered the gold standard - in the testing is 1.5 lakh every day, the UP government further said.
The state credited its aggressive ‘Test, Trace and Treat’ strategy for achieving the milestone. "A widely deployed and efficient testing strategy in Uttar Pradesh has helped in limiting the spread of new cases as it significantly reduced the chance of individuals with undetected virus exposure from roaming freely among unexposed individuals," the government said in the release.
Further, the state government said that the number of active cases of Covid-19 has come down by 93 per cent from its peak on April 30. In a state with population of 240 million, the count of active cases stands at 28,694, said the release. In April, this number had reached 3,10,783.
The state's recovery rate is above 97 per cent, and number of containment zones are down to 13,702, according to government data.
The daily positivity rate - the number of positive cases against the total tests done - on Tuesday dipped to 0.45 per cent in Uttar Pradesh. It has been below 1 per cent for more than a week now, according to the government.
This rate was at its highest at 16.84 per cent on April 24.
On Tuesday, the Uttar Pradesh government launched an ambitious vaccination campaign, in which the administration aims to inoculate 1 crore people in a month. Claimed by a government's spokesman as the world's biggest vaccination campaign, two special vaccination centres have been set up in rural areas and three in urban areas for vaccinating the age group of 18 to 44 years.
