LUCKNOW: The 12-day-long special door-to-door screening which is being undertaken across six districts of Meerut division, including Noida and Ghaziabad, attained almost 90 per cent of its daily sampling target on the first two days, officials said.
The district administration on Friday declared that it would ramp up the tests through rapid antigen testing facility as RT-PCR testing was a slower option. Notably, to match the rising number of sample collection during the concerted door-to-door drive in the district, the testing facility as to be a faster one.
In the wake of at least 4,000 samples collected daily during the 10-day special drive, the state government has directed the district health authorities to conduct 1,000 on-site antigen testing and 3,000 lab-based reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) facility.
Accepting that it was not possible to test the influx of samples collected during the special drive on a technique comparatively slow, district administration authorities have decided to increase the tests through rapid antigen kits to its optimum level.
At present, the district can process 2,000 RT-PCR tests in a day. According to GB Nagar DM Suhar LY, testing through rapid antigen kit was to meet the stipulated target of sampling 4,000 persons a day.
Out of 1,695 samples collected through rapid kits on Friday, 52 samples tested positive.
The health teams had collected 1,519 samples through RT-PCR tests and the results of which would come in a few days. Apart from this, two samples were collected on TruNat machines of which no one was tested positive.
Around 1,333 teams were deployed for the exercise in GB Nagar. The DM said with the help of 1,500 surveillance teams and 40 sample collection teams formed for the special drive, the district would reach its target of collecting 4,000 samples a day soon.
Meanwhile, the surge in Coviid-19 cases continued GB Nagar and Ghaziabad on Friday. While GB Nagar recorded 96 fresh cases taking the district tally to 1005, Ghaziabad recorded the highest number of fresh case – 140 — in the state. The total number of active cases in Ghaziabad reached 1,045.