COVID cases double of NE in 4 days

Covid-19 +ve cases in NE double from 100 to over 200 in just4 days.

Northeast India had its 1st Covid-19 case on March 24 with a 23-yr-old in Manipur testing +ve. It took 24 days to reach 50 and another 18 days to cross 100 on May 4. But on Saturday the figure reached 212 cases.

As of now, Tripura has  135 positive cases and Assam has 62 cases of which Tripura was the worst affected having 133 active cases. Ironically till May 2, Tripura has just four cases and the exponential growth has put the Tripura government in a spot of trouble as it does not have enough infrastructure to handle the situation. They are now trying to convert hotels into the hospital.

On the other hand, Assam was highly prepared and it handled the first two lockdowns with substantial confidence but after opening the boundary and interstate movement, the fresh cases reported but no at the speed of the Tripura. On May 7 it had 8 patients, next day -6, and on May 9 three patients of which driver of the ambulance from Mumbai decided to drive home instead of being in the hospital in highly controversial circumstances.

In Guwahati, Community infection has been suspected as three of the four patients have no travel history. From tomorrow, 40 random tests per wards have been planned to check the antibodies in a bid to find the spread of community infection.

The ICMR induced program will depend on Elisa kit than the PCR kit for quick results. But the doctors are suspicious that in Guwahati community spread is silently happening as there are no random tests so far have been carried out.