| Coronavirus growth rate slowing in J&K: Kansal | | ‘Testing rate now 703 per million, 2nd highest in country’ | |  Early Times Report
Jammu, Apr 21: Principal Secretary, Planning, Development & Monitoring and Information, Rohit Kansal today said that rapid testing and effective control measures in J&K have helped reduce the rate of growth of coronavirus leading to decrease in doubling rate.
Kansal, who is also the Govt Spokesperson, was addressing a press conference, whereat he gave an overall update about the COVID situation in the Union Territory.
He said that the testing rate in J&K has been increased to 703 per million, which is second highest in the country, while initially it was 77.5 per million.
“We were one of the first to have our own testing facilities. Since then we have been continuously ramping up our facilities. From a testing capacity of 50 tests a day, the number of samples tested yesterday was more than 700” Kansal informed and added that the capacity will be shortly braced up to 1000 tests per day in our four ICMR accredited labs.
“We are enhancing testing capacities in these labs as well and shortly adding two more labs. We are maintaining supply chains of essential reagents and are adding more and advanced equipment and manpower” he told the media. He further informed that decentralised sample collection centres have also been set up in the districts.
“Our strategy of aggressive tracing and increased testing will continue” he said and informed the UT has received the first tranche of 24,000 kits for undertaking the rapid COVID testing in the community. This along with already established procedure will be used for more and more testing.
Reiterating that there is certainly a case for some respite, he said as of this moment, the total number of positive cases in J&K is 380 of which the number of active cases is 294, including 256 in the Kashmir Division and 38 in the Jammu division. One active case has been reported from Kathua district today.
“As you are already aware, there have been 81 recoveries which include young children and we also have had 5 unfortunate deaths” he said and added that 60,000 (Sixty thousand) persons have been enlisted for surveillance out of which nearly 35,000 (Thirty-five thousand) have completed the mandatory 28 days period of surveillance. |
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