BHUBANESWAR: Despite the gradual decrease in positivity rate, the state government has pulled up some of the districts as well as the state capital to ramp up RT-PCR as well as rapid antigen tests.
While the districts of Sundargarh and Ganjam along with Bhubaneswar city need to increase both RT-PCR and antigen tests, Jharsuguda, Kalahandi and Balasore need to ramp up antigen test with Kandhamal and Khurda (rural) lagging behind in RT-PCR tests, the health department pointed out during a presentation before the chief minister Naveen Patnaik.
On Wednesday the state’s positivity rate dropped to 12.59% with 8,399 infected from among 66,683 samples tested.
However, the day also saw 40 Covid patients succumb to the virus, the highest in a single day so far.
The government, meanwhile, has set a target of testing 71,800 samples daily out of which 21,800 would be RT-PCR tests and 50,000 antigen tests.
Ajay Parida, director, Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), said the twin approach of testing and vaccinating will lead us to ensure a sharp fall in daily Covid infection count.
“In fact, testing will help identify and isolate the infected ones while vaccination will ensure protection.
This way the chain can be broken.
We are now seeing the result.
Hopefully, in the next two weeks, we will have the daily count going down faster,” Parida said appreciating government’s move to ramp up testing on the face of gradual slowing down of infection.
At present, the state has 84.72% patients in home isolation with dependency on general beds in Covid hospitals going down to 43.35%, a health department source said.
Khurda district reported 1102 new cases with Cuttack second with 766 cases.
The capital city continues to add bulk of cases to that of Khurda.
The city reported 918 fresh infections against 1102 recoveries.
With recoveries going past new cases for the past few days, the active cases have come down to a little over 10,000 from more than 12,000 earlier.