Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], Aug 4 (ANI): Against the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 140 tests per million population per day, Jammu and Kashmir is now conducting 900 tests per million per day, said Union Home Secretary, Ajay Kumar Bhalla on Tuesday.

While chairing a high-level meeting to review the management of COVID-19 pandemic in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, Bhalla said, "Five additional testing laboratories, 4 CBNAAT facilities and 15 TRUENAT laboratories were established in government medical institutions, besides, augmenting the RTPCR tests with Rapid Antigen Tests. Jammu and Kashmir is now conducting 900 tests per million per day against the WHO recommendation of 140 tests per million population per day."

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Bhalla said that the government is also in the process of procuring 3 COBAS 6800 fully automated systems to enhance per day testing capacity, which is currently at 12,000 tests per day.

Health and Medical Education Department gave a presentation on the prevailing situation in the UT.

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"The meeting was informed that J-K is performing reasonably well in mitigating COVID-19 pandemic with 53,323 tests per million population, 1,746 cases per million population, doubling rate of 27.2 days, 3.3 per cent positivity rate, 61.3 per cent recovery rate, and 1.8% mortality rate. It was mentioned that the UT has so far conducted 6.5 lakh tests," reads an official release.

Union Home Secretary while reviewing the COVID death audit report observed that most of the critical patients die within 72 hours of hospitalization and emphasized on the need to tackle the issue.

Further, Chief Secretary informed that the Government has recently revised home quarantine guidelines to permit such isolation in favour of asymptomatic patients with no co-morbidity and have Arogya Setu app downloaded for better monitoring, and said that this will reduce the burden on healthcare institutions and will pave way to better monitoring of critical cases. (ANI)

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