Bhubaneswar: Escalating its fight against COVID-19 pandemic, Odisha government will follow the strategy of aggressive testing from August. Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) director, Ajay Parida on Friday that the State will conduct tests of 20000 samples a day from the coming month.
After a high-level meeting of the health department, Parida today informed that the State had been conducted nearly 12,000 tests per day for past several days. On Friday, a record 14,335 samples were tested for COVID-19 in the State.
“Odisha government has decided to conduct 20,000 Coronavirus tests daily from August. It will include 8,000 RT-PCR tests while the remaining will be Antigen tests,” said Parida.
At present, Odisha is having adequate number of Antigen kits and nearly 3,000 to 5,000 kits are available in all the districts of the State.
A proposal to allow private labs to conduct Antigen tests has been sent to the government and once the approval comes, the prices of the tests can be capped.
As part of the strategy to ensure that no symptomatic person is left out, the overall testing in Odisha is being increased and 20,000 tests per day is a good number, the ILS director added.
According to Parida, there has been no drop in the overall testing per day in Ganjam, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Jajpur. However, it is being observed that there has been a slight drop in the positive cases from these pockets.
“We will observe the trend for the next four to five days. At present, the overall COVID-19 situation is stable as the cases are rising in few districts. We hope that the overall COVID-19 situation will improve in the month of August,” said Parida.
(Edited By Suryakant Jena)
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