The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has taken on a mammoth task. Under the ‘Mission Universal Testing’, BMC will start jumbo rapid antigen testing across 24 wards of the city from today. Civic officials said this initiative will increase their daily testing by 3,000 per day. The BMC claims that they have yielded good results with only 1 per cent false negative after the RT- PCR test.
Earlier, rapid antigen testing was limited to North Mumbai, but now it will be done across all wards.
Nearly 10,000 frontliners warriors including police, volunteers and doctors will be tested. They are likely to be the carrier of SARS- COV-2 virus. “We need to test each and everyone as there is a possibility of people who have not been Covid-19 positive but are carriers of virus. With rapid antigen testing it will help identify the spread of infection. Based on that testing strategies will be planned,” said Suresh Kakani, additional municipal commissioner, BMC.
The Free Press Journal had earlier reported that 12 per cent have been tested positive under rapid antigen testing. A majority of them are asymptomatic. They were shifted to Covid Care Centres for treatment. According to the latest data, nearly 9,000 people admitted at CCC and hospitals have been tested using rapid antigen kits.
“We yielded good results with the rapid antigen kits as the success rate of this was 99 percent. It helped us identify Covid-19 infected people within 30 minutes. Of which only one per cent antigen reports came to be false negative after the RT-PCR test,” Kakani said.
Moreover, the civic body has planned to increase the per day testing capacity to 9,000 from current 5,500 to 6,500. Since the first week of July, nearly 500 people have been tested with rapid antigen kits which will now increase to 3,000 people every day.
“Under this jumbo rapid antigen testing it will help us to identify asymptomatic patients and start their treatment before they spread to others,” added Kakani.
So far, 4,56,711 people have been tested for corona, of which 1,05,829 have been tested Covid-19 positive. The positivity and recovery rate of the city is 23 per cent and 72 per cent respectively.
