Uttar Pradesh discovers a mobile phone used to register 7300 people for COVID tests

This is straight from the Ripley’s Believe it or not. In the ongoing corona tests one mobile number was used for registration of 7343 tests and all of them were tested negative. This happened in Bareilly from January till March 31.

This fraud speaks volumes about the BJP-led Government’s claim of carrying out the maximum number of corona tests in the state. The government claims that over 1.50 lakh corona tests are being carried out daily and on Friday Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath asked officials to ramp up the testing further and take the number to 2 lakh per day. He further said that half of these tests would be RT PCR.

“The fraud detected in testing figures show how hollow the government claim is,” a senior government doctor told this reporter on condition of anonymity for the obvious reasons.

The fraud came to light when the mobile number 70197xxxx31 was accidentally keyed in on the Covid portal during random checking. The officials were shocked to see 7343 tests carried out under this number. Majority of the tests were antigen tests while a few were RTPCR tests too. The reports of all these tests were shown as negative.

An official says that there was pressure on the medical staff to carry out an allotted number of tests every day. “Some of the paramedics found a better way to meet the target by using one mobile number for registration and showed the result as negative,” he said and added that the paramedic who carried out the test was smart enough to give a negative report because positive reports would have meant that patients needed to be hospitalized and this would have exposed him.

The para-medic who carried out the fraud has been identified.

This is not the first time such an incident has been reported. Earlier, a health worker was caught on camera collecting the swab of a doctor multiple times to boost the test rest.