New Delhi: In a significant move towards India's fight against COVID-19 pandemic, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has allowed all registered medical practitioners, including private doctors to prescribe for COVID-19 testing.
The development is expected to give a much-needed fillip, at a time, when the government has been constantly emphasizing on the importance of testing.
The Union Health Ministry took the decision after consulting domain experts and state government representatives.
"Through a significant step announced by the central government COVID-19 testing can now be done on the prescription of any registered practitioner and not exclusively by a government doctor," officials in the Health Ministry said.
Till date, only a government doctor can prescribe for a COVID-19 test.
The centre has strongly advised states and Union Territories (UTs) to take all immediate steps to facilitate testing at the earliest by enabling all qualified medical practitioners, including private practitioners, to prescribe COVID test to any individual fulfilling the criteria for testing as per ICMR guidelines.
"The centre has advised states and UTs to ensure full capacity utilization of all COVID-19 testing laboratories. This shall ensure full capacity utilisation of all labs especially the private ones, thus hugely benefiting the people," officials said.
Interestingly, ICMR has also recommended that laboratories should be free to test any individual in accordance with the ICMR guidelines and State authorities must not restrict and individual from getting tested "as early testing will help in containing the virus and saving lives."
The Health Ministry said that the total number of tests in the country will soon touch 1 crore. As on date, 90,56,173 tests have been conducted through a diagnostic testing network which is fast expanding.
At present, there are 1065 testing labs in the country including 767 public sector labs and 297 private labs. As many as 2,29,588 testing took place in the last 24 hours.
On Wednesday, Health Secretary Preeti Sudan and ICMR DG Balram Bhargava have also asked States and Union Territories to expedite COVID-19 testing.
Centre has also asked states and UTs to facilitate testing in a big way by the adoption of 'campaign mode' which includes organizing testing camps, using mobile vans, etc.
"This should effectively take the COVID-19 test to the people's doorsteps in high incidence areas to collect samples of all symptomatic individuals as well as their contacts and get the samples tested by using rapid antigen test," officials said.
Health Ministry statistics said that India's COVID recovery rate touches 60 per cent with 11881 patients recovering from the disease in the last 24 hours which takes the total recovered number to 359859. At present, there are 226947 active COVID cases in India.
Maharastra, Delhi, and Tamil Nadu are the top three states and Union Territories registering absolute numbers of COVID-19 recovered cases with states like Chandigarh, Meghalaya, and Rajasthan registering top recovery rate.
Also read: Kejriwal announces India's first plasma bank in Delhi
