The Khyber Paktunkhwa health department has begun the random testing of the vulnerable population across the province for novel coronavirus in an effort to increase the number of tests and know about the prevalence of the infection.

Officials told Dawn that health workers were randomly collecting swabs from people working in markets, shopping malls, hotels and tourist places for free Covid-19 testing. They said samples had so far been collected from 8,340 people.

According to them, the province has around 6,000 testing capacity daily at the 16 Covid-19 labs, including 11 in public sector and five in private sector, but was struggling to scale up testing and ascertain the number of patients in the province.

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