The global health body World Health Organisation (WHO) has complimented the Yogi Adiyanath-led Uttar Pradesh government for taking proactive steps and increasing contact tracing efforts to mitigate the covid-19 in rural areas of the state and hopes the state would soon mitigate the deadly virus.
In a drive that kicked off on May 5, the Yogi government has formed 141,610 teams, consisting of two members each, moving across 97,941 villages in 75 districts in the state.
The teams are visiting people door-to-door, and testing everyone who is showing the symptoms of covid-19 using the Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) kits. Those who test positive are being quickly isolated and given a medicine kit with advice on the disease.
The state government has deployed 21,242 supervisors from the state health department for this activity to ensure all rural areas are covered.
Furthermore, the government in the state has allocated two vans to each block within a district in the state to test people with symptoms.
The step has been taken to contain the transmission in the rural areas.
Praising the same, the WHO in an article, titled “UTTAR PRADESH Going the last mile to stop COVID-19” lauded the UP government for their initiative on such a large scale.
The global health body said that they are supporting the UP government and its field officers are on the ground to monitor and share real-time feedback with the government for immediate corrective action to ensure quality.
“WHO, which supported the Uttar Pradesh government in training and micro-planning for the activity, now has field officers on the ground to monitor and share real-time feedback with the government for immediate corrective action to ensure quality. On an inaugural day, WHO field officers monitored over 2,000 government teams and visited at least 10,000 households. WHO will also support the Uttar Pradesh government on the compilation of the final reports.”
WHO also took to its official Twitter handle to inform how India’s most populous state has “initiated house-to-house active case finding of #COVID19 in rural areas to contain transmission” on such a big scale.
Stating that “micro-planning, house visits, concurrent monitoring, and follow-ups were core to India’s polio eradication”, the body hoped that the state government will soon be able to mitigate the deadly virus.
Apart from that providing information on how the state government has been battling with the vaccine crisis in the state, the UP government officials informed that their government had floated a global tender on May 7 to procure 4 crore doses of Covid-19 vaccine, becoming the first Indian state to do so.
Meanwhile, speaking to the media, Yogi Adityanath informed that in past eight days, over 65,000 active coronavirus cases have been reduced in the state.
