Puducherry reached a COVID-19 milestone on Thursday when it became the country’s first Union Territory to test 10% of its population.
The Union Territory, which scaled up testing from about 1,500 samples a day a month ago to over 5,000 now, has in all tested 1,55,025 samples as on Thursday, with 1,25,215 of them returning negative.
The number of persons tested constitutes 10% of the 15 lakh population in the Union Territory.
The sustained increase in testing and a qualitative shift in surveillance has been central to the Union Territory’s success in lowering the test positivity rate to less than 10% now from 35% to 45% three weeks ago.
On Thursday, it logged 668 new cases from 5,945 tests at a positivity rate of about 11%.
“Among the key factors are strengthening of health manpower and the calibration of containment and active surveillance strategy that enabled detection and isolation of new cases to break the transmission chain,” T. Arun, Health Secretary and District Collector, told The Hindu.
While the expert advice, from WHO to ICMR, had been to scale up testing (trace-test-isolate-treat) to flatten the COVID-19 curve, the gradual uptick in the number of tests started in the second week of this month. Teams of field staff have been going door-to-door to screen for ILI/SARI symptoms and undertake RT-PCR and Rapid Antigen Tests, which are more or less in equal ratio.
Meanwhile, the Collector told a press conference that the procurement of an RNA extraction machine at the IGMCRI had resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of tests from about 30 a day initially to about 465 on Wednesday.
The Vector Control Research Institute has been doing a similar number of tests.
“This, coupled with the deployment of 17 mobile teams and 26 COVID-19 focus centres, has contributed to higher testing rates,” he said.
Besides sustaining the testing level of about 5,000 samples a day, the administration’s focus has been to curb the COVID-19 fatalities. The case fatality rate is in the range of 2%, which is higher than the national average of about 1.65%.
Delay proving fatal
“Our analysis shows that a good number of these deaths could have been prevented if the patients had reached hospitals early enough as many fatalities were happening within 48 hours of admission. Our appeal to the public is to bring patients with symptoms to a hospital without delay so that treatment can be initiated promptly,” Mr. Arun said.
The Union Territory recorded six more deaths, taking the toll to 487. The patients, including four women, were in the 50-75 age group. With this, the toll is 487 and the tally is 24,895 cases with 5,097 active ones and 19,311 discharged.