People outside urban centres did not follow COVID-19 appropriate behaviour properly: Centre

People outside urban centres in Bihar did not follow COVID-19 appropriate behaviour properly during the election campaign in Bihar, said the Union Health Ministry on Tuesday citing the observations of the central team sent to the state during the election campaign.

"We had deputed a central team to Bihar during the election campaign period. The central team has found certain good practices and certain areas of concern," said Rajesh Bhushan, Union Health Secretary while replying to a query on Bihar government's COVID-19 containment strategy.

"The central team found that outside urban centres--wearing of masks, maintaining social distancing and hand hygiene were less than satisfactory. So those findings, we have shared with the state government as we do. We are happy to report that once we shared those findings with the states, Bihar initiated requisite corrective action," he said.

Bhushan said that Bihar has so far done about 1,15,21, 841 COVID-19 tests out of which nearly 12,93,900 are RT-PCR tests.

According to the government, whatever the total number of tests Bihar has done, roughly 12 per cent are RT-PCR tests and remaining are rapid antigen tests, he stated.

"Bihar has always been advised by us that whenever they conduct the rapid antigen tests those who are symptomatic negatives must mandatorily be subjected to RT-PCR test. This is the advice we have given to all states and UTs. We do not want any undetected person to move around freely and spread infection."

It may be noted that Bihar held elections in three phases for a total of 243 seats, i.e. first phase on October 28, second phase on November 3 while the third phase was conducted on 7 November.

According to the Union Ministry of Health, Bihar has 6,503 active cases, 2,15,263 cured/discharged/migrated cases and 1,151 fatalities as of November 10.

( With inputs from ANI )

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