RANCHI: The state department of health, medical education and family welfare on Wednesday claimed that it will conduct RT-PCR and TruNat tests of over 2 lakh people from the rural parts of Jharkhand who tested negative for Covid-19 through rapid antigen tests in the 10-day long intensive public health survey (IPHS), which was conducted across 24 districts between May 25 and June 5.
“A letter has been dispatched to all the districts and the medical facilities which have RT-PCR and TruNat testing facilities to augment their daily testing capacities so that we can test the samples from rural areas,” Siddarth Tripathi, the nodal officer of the department’s IEC wing, said.
Tripathi said RAT was adopted during the IPHS as RT-PCR and TruNat methods are time consuming.
“We distributed home isolation kits containing medicines to all such people,” Tripathi claimed.
The department had claimed that over 2.64 crore people were screened during the door-to-door IPHS, which was undertaken by the administrations of all 24 districts in their respective rural areas.
Of them, nearly 2.08 lakh people were screened through RAT, of which 981 people tested positive.
Among the positive patients, 11 were referred to Covid care centres for medical care.
However, questions are being raised about the efficacy of the IPHS as a negative report through RAT is not considered genuine.
The ICMR guidelines mandate RT-PCR tests for suspected Covid-19 patients who have tested negative through RAT.
The IPHS revealed that in the rural population, nearly 16,677 people had tuberculosis.
As many as 1.17 lakh people had diabetes and 12,000 people had cardiac ailments and high blood pressure.
On Tuesday, chief minister Hemant Soren announced that his government was planning to make the IPHS a bi-annual exercise for health profiling the state’s rural population.
Meanwhile, the Union ministry of health and family welfare, in its revised national guideline for Covid-19 vaccination, said the allocation to the state can be curtailed if they report high vaccine wastage.
Subsequently, the chief minister’s office issued a statement claiming that vaccine wastage in Jharkhand was down to 1.5% from 4.5%.
“On May 26, the vaccination wastage was close to 4.5%, but it has now come down to 1.5%.
The relentless awareness campaign of the state government is now yielding results,” the statement read.
In May, the Centre had branded Jharkhand as the state with highest vaccine wastage (37%) in the country, which the state government had denied.