Increase testing, be cautious: Centre to states after COVID spike elsewhere

The Centre has asked the states and UTs to be cautious amid a spike in COVID cases in Asia and Europe.

The Union Health Ministry on Friday asked the states to have a five-fold strategy of “test, track, treat, follow COVID-appropriate behaviour and vaccinate.

In a letter, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan asked the states to ensure proper testing of samples so that new variants are detected in time, NDTV has reported.

Also read: Over 8.21 lakh children in 12-14 category get COVID vaccine

“States should also ensure that adequate number of samples are submitted to INSACOG network through Sentinel sites, as per the protocol issued by National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), which is the Nodal Agency for INSACOG, to ensure timely detection of new variants while maintaining adequate testing as per the protocols for testing laid by ICMR. Effective surveillance by monitoring of emerging clusters of new cases, if any, testing as per norms and monitoring of ILI and SARI cases shall be taken up on a continued basis to ensure no early warning signals are missed and spread of infection can be controlled,” Bhushan said in the letter.

India is seeing a steady decline in COVID cases, with daily cases now below 5,000 mark.

Also read: China’s COVID wave surges; India reports 2k fresh infections

India reported 2,539 fresh COVID cases on Thursday, taking the total COVID tally in the country to 4,30,01,477.

The active cases declined to 30,799, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated by 8 am on Friday.

The death toll due to the virus increased to 5,16,132 with 60 fresh fatalities, according to the ministry data.