LUCKNOW: With encouraging response from the first spell of weekend restrictions, the Uttar Pradesh government has announced to continue with the practice till further orders to check the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus and tame the surge in the state.
Notably, UP is witnessing a spike as around 10,000 cases have been added to the state tally in the first 10 days of the month of July. In the present scenario, the state tally of fresh cases crosses the 1000 mark on a daily basis.
There were 1,388 fresh cases of COVID-19 during the last 24 hours in the state with state capital Lucknow recording the biggest spike so far by registering 165 cases followed by Ghaziabad where 142 fresh cases were notified.
There was, comparatively, a let up in the situation in Gautam Buddh Nagar and Meerut in NCR as both the districts recorded 64 and 59 cases respectively in the last 24 hours.
So far, 934 people in UP have the lost the battle of life to the deadly virus. Currenlty, the state has 12,208 active cases and 23,334 have been discharged after treatment. Till Sunday, more than 12,000 people were kept in isolation wards of hospitals.
The decision to keep the state under lockdown for some more weekends was taken at the high level meeting presided over by CM Yogi Adityanath, who underlined the need of restricting social activity on Saturday and Sunday while allowing economic activity to be carried out with all possible precautions throughout the week.
This weekend’s 55-hour lockdown had come into force on Friday at 10 pm and is set to end on Monday at 5 am.
As per the order issued by UP Chief Secretary, RK Tewari, the industrial units in rural areas would continue to operate. In urban areas, except for continuously working units, other industrial units will remain closed. The order was meant till 5 am on July 13.
According to Additional chief secretary (information and home), Awanish Awasthi, the decision to impose restriction from the night of Friday till Monday morning had yielded significant positive results. The curbs would not apply on continuous industrial operating units and infrastructure development activities including construction of expressways and other road projects.
The ACS, home, said that besides setting up of Covid help desks in all the industries and allied activities to keep a check on the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing door-to-door screening, state government had also decided to increase testing of samples to 50,000 per day.
Till Saturday, the state government had touched a figure of 39,600 samples which were tested on a single day. Awasthi said that the state government had set a target of conducting 30,000 tests through real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) technique, 15,000 through antigen testing kits and 2,000 through Trunat. He added that as many as 15 medical colleges in the state were conducting 1000 tests each per day.