With wave of returnees, states see spike in Covid cases

NEW DELHI: Migrant workers and other stranded people returning to their native places since last week now account for the largest chunk of new Covid-19 cases in at least two states — 90 out of 101 in Odisha’s sharpest single-day spike on Wednesday and around 390 of the 404 reported in Bihar over the past nine days — while bulking up the tally in states already handling big numbers.
Odisha has reported 376 positive cases since May 3, the day migrant workers started returning by buses and shramik trains. More than 300 of them came from Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, officials said.
Ganjam district alone has contributed 210 of these new cases, most of them migrants who arrived from Surat in Gujarat. As of Wednesday, Odisha’s Covid-19 tally was 538, up from 437 overnight. “The spurt in positive cases wasn’t unexpected,” special relief commissioner Pradeep Kumar Jena said. “But it isn’t cause for concern yet because all the returnees are in quarantine centres and have not mingled with the local population.” Since May 3, around 37 trains and 400-odd buses have carried 70,000 migrant Odisha workers home.
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In Bihar, 190 of the workers who returned between May 5 and 10 tested positive for the virus. Another 183 cases were reported on May 11 and 12. “Most of the new positive cases are primarily migrant workers,” principal secretary Sanjay Kumar said. “The spurt in numbers started on May 8, when Bihar started random testing of returnees.”
Jharkhand, too, has seen its Covid-19 cases soar since shramik trains started bringing migrant workers home, the biggest spike coming on May 8 when 20 people in Giridih and two in Koderma tested positive. Prior to this, the only occasion when 20 cases were reported in a day was in Ranchi on April 27.
Between April 28 and May 4, Jharkhand’s tally rose by barely a dozen new cases. Since May 5, a total of 58 cases were reported, a five-fold increase in which migrant workers accounted for 48 cases.