The state government has set a target of conducting at least 1 lakh Covid tests in the next three days in a bid to find more asymptomatic patients, health minister Banna Gupta said on Thursday.
The testing, he said, would help the health machinery get a clearer picture of the situation and proceed with its work accordingly. “The target is to test 1 lakh people. We will try our level best to achieve it,” Gupta said.
The government has so far collected samples of around 2.9 lakh Covid suspects and tested nearly 2.8 lakh of them, figures with the National Health Mission (NHM) reveal. Chief minister Hemant Soren recently said that around 8,000 Covid tests were being conducted across Jharkhand every day, and attributed the spike in cases to the intensified testing regime.
However, conducting 1 lakh tests in three days, nearly four times the average in Jharkhand, would require extra efforts from health workers and district administrations, doctors involved in treating Covid patients said.
Health director Ravi Shankar Shukla said the state was equipped with infrastructure to test 1 lakh people in the next three days. “The aim is to test as many people as possible and find maximum possible cases. Different districts have been given targets as per their manpower and infrastructure.”
The testing, Shukla said, would be done through TrueNat, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and rapid antigen test (RAT). “The more cases we find, the better it will be for us. If most of the patients are tested and isolated, then the spread of the virus can be checked,” he added.
The drive will be aggressively run on July 31, August 1 and August 2 across the 24 districts in Jharkhand, said Shukla, adding that while the Ranchi administration would try and conduct at least 4,000 tests during this period, East Singhbhum will aim to conduct around 3,500 tests. Dhanbad has set a target of testing around 3,000 people during the special drive.
Doctors leading Jharkhand's fight against Covid-19 have said that a majority of patients in the state were asymptomatic, and it was difficult to say if a person was infected only on the basis of symptoms.
Around 10,000 cases of coronavirus infection have surfaced in Jharkhand so far, and around 6,000 of them are active, government data states. The number of Covid casualties in the state crossed 100 on Thursday, while the recovery rate staggered around 40 per cent, officials said.