To minutely analyse the state’s COVID-19 situation, the Odisha government has announced that they would conduct tests of at least 5000 people from different locations in the capital city over the next seven days. Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy said that testing facilities in Bhubaneswar and other regions in the state are being ramped up to increase the capacity of handling more samples per day. The higher the samples, the easier it would become for experts to analyse the situation.
Asit Tripathy in a media briefing said, “The number of samples tested in the city is about 38 per cent of the total samples tested in Odisha and around 2.4 per cent people have been found to be positive. Keeping that in mind we have decided to go for the test of 5000 more samples in the next week”.
The decision was taken after studying the rising pattern of positive coronavirus cases in cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and others where the number of cases is significant. “If we can manage to conduct the tests as planned, it will be a great initiative as no city has been able to conduct so many tests per one million or for that matter per one lakh population,” Tripathy said.
The capital city has been divided into three zones and two senior bureaucrats have been assigned with responsibilities of testing and strict containment measures. The state government has termed this as the ‘Bhubaneswar Strategy’. The primary surveillance zone has been established in Bhubaneswar because out of 60 positive cases in Odisha, 46 have been reported from the temple city. Further, Khurda has been listed among the 123 hotspot districts in the country.
“We have arranged more real-time PCR machines and imparted training to microbiologists and technicians to conduct the tests. Apart from testing of samples, we would also look into the epidemiological study of COVID-19 in the city,” Tripathy added.
Following the direction of the government, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has started collecting samples of its own employees. Health teams have already collected more than 100 samples of BMC employees at the municipal headquarters.