ludhiana as the number of daily covid tests in the district has fallen in the recent times the health department has directed its officials to increase the testing health experts suggested it is very important to conduct adequate number of tests and genome sampling so that new variant if any can be identified immediately and necessary steps are taken to check its spread civil surgeon dr s p singh said as such there is no target of testing but they are getting something between 40004500 tests in a day he said the health teams were busy with the pulse polio programme and election duty before thatdr singh said that they have asked the teams to increase the daily testing to 5000 for which he has held a meeting with senior medical officers smos telling them that 40004500 tests daily is less he said the situation might continue in the next few days after which they would start getting more than 5000 tests done so that they know the status of cases an health officer said samples of around 5 who test positive are sent for genome sequencing in 90 of cases in january it was omicron ba1 variant he said though they havent got any such update from the centre or state about future surge the preventive and social medicines department which has its own method shares its predictions about the pandemicwe believe that even the socalled third wave was a surge and the coming wave may be surge only in third wave hospitalization was bare minimum said the health officials they said it is important not to let the guard down the civil surgeon said since the vaccination coverage has picked up impact of any new variation in the virus is expected to be less meanwhile the data of more than a month revealed that the daily tests stood at 6124 on february 2 remained mostly above 5000 till february 9 and was 6202 on february 10 on february 21 it was just 1810 2742 on february 28 and 3013 on march 2dr clarence samuel head of the department of preventive and social medicine and a reputed epidemiologist of state said it is very important to get genome sequencing of positive patients done as it is vital to identify the virus strain that is circulating in the society he said by doing so the government can devise strategy and act accordinglythe expert said that it is also important to do adequate number of tests so that spread of infection in the society is known