GUWAHATI: Assam’s Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Sunday said the state’s success story in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic was that there had not been a single case of community transmission.
“Assam’s success story is that we could keep everybody under facility quarantine, not home quarantine…We did not get a single case of community transmission. Whatever positive cases we got were from within the quarantine centres,” Sarma told journalists.
What he essentially meant was that all the nine-ten cases of secondary transmissions in the state were recorded from people who were kept in quarantine facilities. They got the virus from some of the around 25 Tablighi Jamaat returnees who tested positive. Some of them are family members of the Jamaatis.
“If cases keep coming from quarantine centres, we have nothing to fear but if a case comes from a village, a town or a city tomorrow, then we will have to look at it with a different perspective,” the minister said.
The last case was reported from a quarantine facility in Dhubri and Sarma said random checking was being conducted at three different places of the district to find if there were other cases there.
“We resorted to random collection of swab samples scientifically. We will get a picture by tomorrow (Monday) evening if the disease is in the society,” Sarma said.
Pointing out that the last case of primary transmission was recorded on March 12 when a Tablighi Jamaat attendee tested positive, he said there should not be any fresh case of primary transmission in the state after a gap of more than 40 days.
There were 35 cases in Assam and the government could not find the source of one of them. Nineteen people have been already discharged from hospitals as they recovered. Eight others will be discharged on Sunday. Sarma was hopeful that some of the remaining seven patients could be discharged by April 30.
The coronavirus-free states in the Northeast are Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Tripura and Sikkim.