Thiruvananthapuram, May 28: Chief Minister, Shri Pinarayi Vijayan today announced that with a large number of people coming back to Kerala from other States and Countries, the State has decided to ramp up the testing to 3,000 tests per day. He was responding to allegations that the State was not doing enough tests.
Addressing the media, the Chief Minister said, “Kerala has been following the ICMR guidelines in tackling the Covid pandemic and the much-acclaimed Kerala model is a result of that. The central Health Ministry itself has recognised this and publicly commended Kerala’s work. Initially, the swab testing facility was available only at the Virology Institute at Alappuzha but now, due to the consistent efforts of the state government, we have 15 institutions approved by ICMR for conducting the tests. There are five private labs also. Initially, Kerala received very few test kits from ICMR and we have used the available kits carefully. Later, we had decided on conducting antibody tests on a large scale but the test kits from ICMR were of inferior quality and ICMR itself recommended against using them. Now with more people coming from outside the State, we have decided to increase the number of tests being done per day to 3,000.”
The CM also said that sentinel surveillance tests are done to check any community spread and as on today, there is no community spread but the situation can change any day. As per the recommendations of the ICMR, those with normal viral fever will also be tested now on as the symptoms are very similar to Coronavirus infection. The number of cases due to primary contact or local transmission is still very low in the State. Kerala has the lowest mortality rate due to Covid, 0.5% as compared to the national figure of 2.89%. The recovery rate is also high in the State. “Kerala has never misrepresented the figures, it has always presented actual figures and has even got appreciation from the central Health Ministry”, he added.
