Govt steadily increased testing capacity: K'taka Minister
Jul 02, 2020
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 2 : Medical Education Minister Dr K Sudhakar held a meeting with senior officials on Thursday to review the COVID-19 situation in the state.
The work is in progress to streamline the process of allocating beds to COVID patients and a new set of guidelines should be ready for release by tomorrow, the minister said.
Dr Sudhakar said that private hospitals have also agreed to reserve beds for treatment of COVID patients.
The suggestion regarding home isolation of asymptomatic cases was also discussed in the meeting.
The minister also inaugurated the COVID testing lab established at Gadag Institute of Medical Sciences through video conference today.
"GIMS has made the entire state proud by becoming the first medical college to obtain approval from Medical Council of India to start PG courses within 5 years of establishment of the college," he said.
"The government is steadily increasing the testing capacity since past 3-4 months and today we have 79 COVID testing labs functioning across the state which includes 44 government and 35 private labs. We now have the capacity to conduct tests for 15,000 samples per day and about 6 lakh samples have been tested in the state so far," he said adding that the government has also conducted survey of about 1.5 households to detect asymptomatic and identify vulnerable persons.
As per the Union Health Ministry, Karnataka had 16,514 confirmed COVID-19 cases on Thursday. This included 8,198 active cases and 8,063 cured and discharged patients. 253 deaths have been reported so far due to the infection in the state.
