Amid rising coronavirus cases and shortage of doctors in the tech city, the Karnataka government has decided to deploy final year medical and science students on COVID duty for ramping up testing and treating the infected, the Medical Education Minister said on July 24.

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"As we are facing shortage of doctors, nurses and paramedics, final year students of MBBS, lab technician courses and science will be trained and assigned COVID duties, including tracing, testing and treating the infected," he said here. Though the state health department has set a target of testing 30,000 samples a day in Bengaluru, which account for 50-60 percent of the positive cases, it could not achieve it due to shortage of staff despite using services of 80 private labs and fever clinics across the city. "As we need more trained personnel for even mobile clinics to contain the virus spread, we have asked the students to volunteer for the service under the Disaster Management Act," he said in a statement.

Of the 5,007 new cases reported from across the southern state on July 24, Bengaluru accounted for 2,267, taking its COVID tally to 41,467. "More data entry operators are being hired from the state-run Keonics to feed the dashboard zone wise in the state war room in real time and process COVID information collected from door-to-door survey by healthcare warriors," the Minister said.

As the city has a whopping 12,000 containment zones, he urged the public representatives to create awareness about the infected persons, quarantining and treating them. "The priority is to trace ILI and SARI cases for testing and treating them to reduce the burden on hospitals and the healthcare personnel who are already overwhelmed," he added.