The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday, July 9, directed 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 BMC has 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 suburbs where coronavirus cases have been on a rise. This decision has been taken to provide efficient and quick treatment to the affected patients. Though the average doubling rate of Mumbai is 44 days, wards like R-Central (Borivli) has a doubling rate of 22 days whereas R-South (Kandivli) is at 25 days.
Currently, the civic body has been testing suspected patients and high-risk contacts in certain specific wards like RN (Dahisar), RC (Borivali West), RS (Kandivli), PN (Malad), PS (Goregaon), KE (Andheri East) and KW (Andheri West). According to the data by BMC last week, KE has reported the highest number of COVID-19 patients with 5,507 cases whereas KW is in the fourth position with over 4,706 cases.
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 issued by the ICMR, without comprising the optimization of Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT PCR) tests in laboratories.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Maharashtra reported 6,603 fresh coronavirus cases which took the overall tally of confirmed cases to 2,23,724, as per the state health department. The number of recovered patients jumped by 4,634 in the same period to reach 1,23,192. As of July 8, there are 91,065 active cases in the state of Maharashtra whereas the death toll has risen to 9,448 after 198 patients succumbed to the illness in the last 24 hours.
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