In a bid to strengthen the efforts against COVID pandemic, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) updated its strategy today for testing coronavirus as the number of infected people crossed the 90,000-mark.
The newly revised strategy focuses on diagnosing symptomatic individuals with a history of international travel in the last 14 days. Moreover, all the symptomatic contacts of the laboratory-confirmed cases, frontline workers and patients of Severe Acute Respiratory Infection or SARI will be tested. According to the new strategy, the asymptomatic direct and high-risk contacts of a confirmed case should be tested once between the fifth and tenth day of coming into contact.
Furthermore, the strategy also states that all those showing symptoms of Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) and patients who develop ILI symptoms should be tested.
Looking at the grim situation, the testing for COVID-19 has been scaled up significantly in the past two months. And, the testing capacity has been increased to nearly one lakh tests per day.
