Bengaluru, Jul 13 (IANS): Amid rising Covid cases and stretched medical infrastructure in the city, the civic body is seeking volunteer swab collectors and counsellors to advise the patients, an official said on Monday.

"We are seeking volunteers to assist the testing teams in civic body area for counselling the Covid patients onsite, tele-counselling and also to volunteer as swab collectors," said Additional Chief Secretary (ACS) Shalini Rajneesh.

Underlining the gravity of the situation, Rajneesh said the pandemic is spreading, resulting in the government putting all its efforts to fight it and ameliorate the distress of the public.

"In this situation, the efforts put in by NGOs and volunteers are commendable and much appreciated," she said.

The senior officer asked interested volunteers to update their details at a web link she shared. Rajneesh is the ACS of Planning, Programme Monitoring and Statistics Department.

Meanwhile, Medical Education Minister K. Sudhakar thanked the people who came up with the idea of volunteering.

"Thanks to Priyanka's efforts, we have got a set of volunteers who will be given online training by Jaffer to become swab collectors or counsellors," said Sudhakar.

He also requested all the district deputy commissioners to create a similar volunteering mechanism to enhance human resources.

"I request all deputy commissioners to do the same and enhance your human resources for operationalizing more and more mobile teams," he said.

Bengaluru continues to be the ground zero of coronavirus in the southern state with 1,525 cases on Sunday, raising its total number of cases to 18,387.

As many as 62 per cent of all the active cases are from the city.

The city is currently grappling with 14,067 active cases and accounted for the highest number of deaths, 274, in Karnataka.