RT-PCR test must for college students, staff

Bengaluru: The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has ordered that in view of colleges and student hostels in Bengaluru reopening on November 17, as per guidelines and SOP issues by UGC and the State government, the students, teachers and non-teaching staff undergo RT-PCR test for Covid-19 and attend schools only if the report is negative. This test is valid for 72 hours in the absence of any symptoms.

"There are around 432 colleges with more than 60,000 students, teachers and non-teaching staff. The educational institutions and colleges in the city will be mapped to one of the nearby 141 BBMP Urban Primary Health Centres (UPHC). The staff and students can get themselves tested at any nearby PHC between 9 AM and 5 PM," the BBMP stated.

In addition, around 450 mobile swab collection teams from each Primary Health Centre (PHCs) will be deployed near educational institutions/colleges. More teams will be placed where there are several educational institutions/colleges.

"The colleges are expecting around 30% student attendance initially and our BBMP swab collection units can cover this population in 1-2 days. As the students are gradually expecting to start coming to colleges, few teams will be deployed near colleges to test them on subsequent days.

Samples taken will be sent promptly to labs to get reports within 24 hrs. The Medical officers will monitor to avoid any delays and send sample collection data daily to cpmobbmp@gmail.com," the order signed by the BBMP Commissioner, N Manjunath Prasad said.

Labs will test and upload results to ICMR portal within 24 hours without fail. All test reports can be accessed by the students, teachers and non-teaching staff at https://www.covidwar.karnataka.gov.in/service1 webpage. This report can be downloaded as a PDF copy too.