The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, on Friday, July 24, began testing its frontline workers with the Rapid Antigen Testing kit. (RAT).
So far, 2,332 staffers of the BMC have tested positive for the coronavirus. Of these, 1,202 have recovered while 109 people have succumbed to the infection. On Friday, antigen tests were conducted in five civic wards namely, F North (Wadala, Matunga and Sion), P North (Malad), H East (Bandra East, Kalina, Vakola), R South (Kandivali), S (Bhandup). The police staff were also tested in a few of these areas.
Moreover, the civic body has appointed six private laboratories to take care of the testing. These are SRL, Infexan, Suburban, Krishna, LifeCare and Thyrocare. These labs were asked to form a team of ten people to make sure that the civic staff and the people who visit the clinics get themselves tested.
The BMC earlier on July 9 had directed the assistant municipal commissioners in Mumbai to take the help of private laboratories to conduct at least 250 tests for the coronavirus every day. This comes after the civic body had procured close to one lakh antigen testing kits, which are able to produce results within a period of 30 minutes. Priority will be given to the wards located in the suburbs where the cases of coronavirus have been on a rise. This decision has been taken to provide efficient and quick treatment to the affected patients.
These testing kits have also been distributed to civic medical colleges and hospitals, and the Deans of these colleges have been asked to conduct testing as per the guidelines authorized by the ICMR, without comprising the optimization of Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT PCR) tests in laboratories.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra on June 24, recorded 9,615 fresh cases of the coronavirus, propelling the state's COVID-19 tally to 3,57,117. At the moment, there are 1,43,714 active cases in the state. With 5,714 COVID-19 patients getting discharged in the day, the number of recovered soared to 1,99,967.
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