In view of the festival season, which is at the onset, District Health officials have launched a 15 days special drive to detect possible cases of Covid 19 among people working in different trades like auto-rickshaws, beauty parlours, restaurants, malls, places of worship etc.

The drive was started in Meerut last Thursday. In two days of random testing, 13 positive cases of Covid 19 have been reported.

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Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Meerut Dr Rajkumar said that the special drive of testing for Covid 19 that started from October 29 will end on November 12. A roster for random testing among people associated with different trades would be done. Each day, people of a single trade are being tested for which the word is circulated to the health teams beforehand.

On day 1, that is October 29, teams conducted random testing of over 2000 tempo drivers, auto-drivers, and e-rickshaw drivers of which 12 drivers were tested positive. On day 2, random testing in beauty parlours and mehendi studios was done in which a single sample was tested positive, informed the CMO adding that on Day 3, that is October 31, testing in sweet shops was done.

Each day a particular trade or segment would be picked and tested randomly for Covid 19, he said adding that next in the row are restaurants, places of worship, malls (including security staff), electronics showrooms, automobile showrooms, street vendors and sellers of crackers, statues, diyas, gift items etc.

The CMO asserted that this special drive will help them to get the status of the spread of Covid 19 in people working in these trades and adequate follow-up action would be taken. He said that such a drive targeting people of different trades was not carried out earlier and is expected to have a better tracing.

In view of the forthcoming festivals, there is a sudden rush of buyers in the market. More and more people are expected to visit public places and places of worship in the coming days. This could also lead to an increase in the number of Covid cases in the district.

This special drive could be really helpful in identifying the untracked cases and isolating them so that they could not become potential spreaders out of sheer ignorance.

There is a total of 12709 cases of Covid 19 and 295 deaths in the district so far. However, the active cases are only 1481.