Uttar Pradesh’s daily Covid-19 testing has been over ten times the WHO’s testing protocol

LUCKNOW, Dec 15(The CONNECT) - Uttar Pradesh today achieved yet another benchmark of testing over nine crore samples for novel coronavirus infection. Testing an average of 2 to 1.5 lakh samples daily, Uttar Pradesh became the first state in the country to cross the milestone.

Early detection and isolation of potentially infectious individuals are the keys to successfully fighting a viral pandemic recognising which the Yogi-led government has effectively implemented and intensified the stringent ‘Trace-Test-Treat' mechanism throughout the state.

Uttar Pradesh’s daily Covid-19 testing has been over ten times more than the prescribed testing protocol by the global health body World Health Organization. The testing protocol laid by the WHO for Uttar Pradesh is 32,000 tests per day, whereas the Covid testing in the state has hovered between 300,000 and 250,000.

In terms of contact tracing too, Uttar Pradesh has left all the other states far behind by testing maximum samples on detection of a single positive case as a result of which the most populous state has been able to effectively break the Covid-chain.

Uttar Pradesh has come a long way from getting the first Covid test conducted from the lab at National Institute of Virology, Pune, in 2020 to breaching

Also read: WHO Pat - UP Going The Last Mile To Stop COVID-19

the 90 million tests-frontier that testifies the enlarged testing capacity in the state. As many as 9,00,17,196 samples have so far been tested in Uttar Pradesh.

Despite being the country’s most populous state, UP has outperformed all other states including Delhi, Maharashtra and Rajasthan by conducting nearly 1.50 lakh RT-PCR tests on an average daily.

Even as Uttar Pradesh has conducted the largest number of Covid-19 testing in the country, the government is pushing for much more testing and soon will equip all the 75 districts with Bio-Safety level-2 laboratories that would further boost the state’s testing capacity, which is already nearly 3 lakh tests a day.

Of the 1,83,187 samples tested in the last 24 hours, just about 19 tested positive. The Test Positivity Rate (TPR) has slumped to even lower than 0.01 percent in Uttar Pradesh. It is pertinent to note that the fresh cases were recorded from only 5 districts.

In the same period, 11 patients recovered from the infection, pushing the recovery rate up to a remarkable 98.7 percent.

The active cases have drastically reduced from a high of 3,10,783 in April to 153 now. As many as 42 districts in the state have brought down the fresh and active Covid-19 cases to zero.