Bengaluru: Following the recent surge in COVID-19 cases across the country, the Union Health Ministry, has now taken special cognizance of the four most-affected states Maharashtra, Kerala, Delhi, and Karnataka. It has asked them to follow the five-fold strategy of Test-Track-Treat-Vaccination and adherence to COVID Appropriate Behavior (CAB), reported ANI.
The Health Ministry has also asked the states to monitor the cluster of new cases and further amplify testing among people.
This came shortly after Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan wrote a letter to the officials of the five states – Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu asking for closely monitoring emerging clusters, maintaining adequate testing, and sending samples from affected individuals for genome sequencing.
Furthermore, the letter states that there is a need to follow a risk-assessment-based approach to public health responses without losing the gains made so far in the fight against the pandemic as the few states which are reporting a higher number of cases indicate the possibility of a localized spread of infection.
While Karnataka breached the 400 mark in daily Covid cases on Thursday as the state logged 471 fresh infections, taking the number of total active cases to 2,880, of which 2,776 are in Bengaluru. Bengaluru registered 458 cases. While the positivity rate for the day was 2.14 %, it was 2.06 % in the past week. The health department said that it conducted 21,927 tests. The growth rate of Covid infection in the past 24 hours was 20.17 %. As many as 214 patients recovered from the infection. Out of this, 208 were in Bengaluru.
