Lucknow, June 21 Mahoba district in Uttar Pradesh has become the first district in the state to be completely Covid-free.
The district, on Monday, saw recovery of the last known infected person.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has announced a reward for the district which eliminated the disease with emphasis on strict screening, treatment and vaccination.
"Mahoba's success must serve as an inspiration for all other districts. It is attributed to the combined efforts of all residents of the district, including health workers, frontline workers and the local administration. The district will be rewarded if the current situation is maintained for one more week," announced the chief minister at a high-level Covid review meeting held on Monday.
Mahoba has been able to bring down the fresh Covid-19 cases from 150 daily to not even a single fresh case of Covid-19 infection for almost a week now.
District magistrate Mahoba, Satyendra Kumar, explained, "This achievement is a result of dedicated efforts of the surveillance committees, local participation, timely provision of free medicine kits, large-scale contact tracing and planned containment strategy as per the directives issued by the chief minister."
The administration prioritized active surveillance while simultaneously providing free medicine kits at the doorstep of infected people through more than 3,000 members of over 363 surveillance committees that are active in the district.
The district conducted house-to-house surveillance through surveillance committees to detect all influenza like illness (ILI), traced contact consistently, and provided medicine kits to ASHA workers and gram pradhans for timely distribution wherever required.
Meanwhile, for the first time in three months, Uttar Pradesh has reported less than 215 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in a single day.
Prior to this, less than 215 fresh cases of infection were recorded in a single day in the state before March 15 this year.
The state is left with just 4,163 active cases out of which nearly 2,500 are under home isolation while the percentage of active cases as against the total confirmed cases is just 0 per cent. Similarly, the test positivity rate is 0.09 per cent.
No new Covid cases have been reported from, at least, 18 districts of Uttar Pradesh in the past 24 hours.
Except for Lucknow, all districts of the state have less than 200 active cases. As many as 66 districts have reported 10 or lesser number of fresh cases.
Additional Chief Secretary (Information) Navneet Sehgal said: "At a time when several states are recording thousands of cases, UP has been able to bring down cases. However, the decline does not mean that people should drop guard against the pandemic as the virus is still active."
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor