BENGALURU: Chief Secretary TM Vijay Bhaskar on Tuesday directed officials to bring down Covid-related fatality and positivity rates in Bengaluru and the state. Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) Commissioner N Manjunath Prasad, who too attended the meeting, told The New Indian Express that these numbers can be brought down only with aggressive testing and ensuring that there is no backlog of cases. In June, the positivity rate was 25% and it has now been reduced to 10%. While only 3,000 tests were conducted that month, it has now increased to 30,000 with no backlog of cases, he added.
Vijay Bhaskar said that officials should test targeted populations and not waste test kits. The number of Covid Care Centres should be reduced as people are preferring home quarantine. Records showed that against the target of 40,400 tests per day, 50,335 rapid antigen tests have been conducted in the last three days. Also, against the target of 20,600 RT-PCR tests, 1,41,609 have been done over the same period.
The data showed that Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology has conducted 633.7 per cent of the targeted tests, which is the highest among all the 43 testing centres in Bengaluru. Against a target of 1,000 samples, 19,012 tests were done over the last three days. It was followed by St John’s Medical College and Hospital, which conducted 319% of the targeted tests. As against 70 tests, it conducted 670.
In the last five days, the maximum number of contacts have been traced in South Zone where cases too are high. With the detection of 1,673 new cases, 15,535 primary and secondary contacts were traced. It was followed by West Zone, which reported 1,686 new cases and traced 10,559 contacts. Average contacts traced is the highest in Mahadevapura Zone at 10.2 per cent, while the lowest is West Zone with 6.3 per cent. Officials at the meeting told Vijay Bhaskar that in many cases, patients are still reluctant to reveal their accurate details and contacts, which indicates that the stigma still prevails.