BHOPAL: Testing has not been increased in Madhya Pradesh in the past one week even after active cases increased. On an average, 16,000 samples were tested from March 7 onwards. Madhya Pradesh is one of seven states that are showing a steep rise in daily new Covid-19 cases and accounts for 87.73 per cent of new instances of the disease reported in a day. Madhya Pradesh has been witnessing a worrying spike in the rate of Covid-19 infection despite an intensive and accelerated inoculation drive through which nearly 15 lakh vaccine doses have been administered to beneficiaries so far.
But the way the health department is carrying out sampling for tests shows that, along with the increasing trend of active cases, sampling has not been increased. Secondly, there is no synchronisation between active cases and samplings and it is leading to an increase in the number of corona-positive cases. Currently, the state has been registering a corona-positive rate of over 4 per cent.
Medical experts stress the need for aggressive testing to curb the number of corona cases and they say that the health department should increase testing accordingly, or else the other districts which have started reporting corona cases will become hotspots again as in the last year.
Burhanpur, which was an ideal district in Madhya Pradesh in 2020 as far as containment of corona cases went, now has over 100 active cases. So, such incidents are an eye-opener for the health department.
