Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said that the state is now facing a bigger challenge of Asymptomatic Covid patients and it can only be dealt with more intense contact tracing and testing. He was speaking at the launch of 13 new biosafety second generation testing labs in the state through video conferencing yesterday.

In a boost to coronavirus testing, the state got 13 new BSL-2 standards which started functioning in various districts yesterday. With this, the state’s capacity of undertaking RT-PCR tests will go up by 5,000 per day. The state is already conducting an average of 1.5 lakh Covid-19 tests per day of which about 50% are RT-PCR. State has conducted more than 50 lakh tests till date.

The Chief Minister said on the occasion that till we develop any vaccine or medical for Covid-19, testing is the only weapon to fight against this pandemic. Every person engaged in testing is a true corona warrior. It is because of testing that we have been able to keep Covid-19 positivity and death rates under control.

The new labs include 10 in the public sector and the remaining three at private medical colleges. Government labs have come up in Basti, Ayodhya, Azamgarh, Banda, Saharanpur, Ambedkarnagar, Badaun, Bahraich, Jalaun and Firozabad while private labs have been set up at Teerthankar Mahaveer Medical College Moradabad, GS Medical College Hapur and Mayo Institute of Medical Sciences in Barabanki district.

Recently, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath  also inaugurated 400-bed dedicated Covid-19 hospital with state of the art facilities in sector 39 of Gautam Buddh Nagar, Noida. He also reviewed the Covid situation in the district and gave instructions to the officials. AIR Correspondent reports that the hospital with modern facilities is developed with the help of Bill and Milinda gates foundation and Tata Trust.

The hospital of Noida, which has a capacity of 400 beds, is the largest state-run Covid facility in the state. Spread across eight floors and equipped with its own diagnostics laboratory and blood bank, it will be the premier facility in the city for covid patient’s care.