Karnataka has ramped up its testing capacity and nearly 35,000 tests have been conducted in the last 24 hours, said Medical Education Minister K. Sudhakar on Saturday.
Addressing presspersons, he said 24,909 RT-PCR tests and 9,315 rapid antigen tests have been done in the State since Friday. This is apart from 110 cartridge-based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT) and 485 TruNat tests taking the total tests in the last 24 hours to 34,819.
“With this, the total number of tests in the State have touched 9,84,996 and by Sunday we will cross 10 lakh tests. Karnataka is one among the 10 States where testing is high. While the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended 140 tests for every 10 lakh population, Karnataka is conducting 300 tests for every 10 lakh population,” the Minister said.
Asserting that the State aimed at conducting 50,000 RT-PCR tests daily in the next few days, the Minister said: “We are now using the one lakh antigen test kits. While we have placed orders for two lakh kits, we are planning to procure over 10 lakh more kits. A decision will be taken at the State COVID-19 task force meeting scheduled on Monday.”
Jawaid Akhtar, Additional Chief Secretary (Health and Family Welfare), said it has now been made mandatory for hospitals to admit only moderately and severely ill patients. All asymptomatic and mild symptomatic patients should be encouraged to get admitted in COVID Care Centres (CCC) or be in home isolation as per their eligibility and suitability following triage. This is to ensure that beds are available for eligible patients. A circular in this regard has been issued on Saturday, he said.
‘No huge backlog’
Clarifying that the State does not have a huge backlog of samples, Mr. Akhtar said: “There is a backlog of entry of negative samples into the ICMR portal as priority is given to positive cases. Because of sheer numbers, there is a delay in entry of negative cases. We have taken a concerted action to enter all those cases. We have deployed additional data entry operators in the labs and within two days there will be no backlog.”
To address issues of non-availability of beds in private hospitals, the department has set up 16 teams of doctors to visit hospitals and coordinate and ensure that 50% of beds are actually available for government referred patients, he said.
