Amit Shah puts Assam on fast track to halt Covid-19 spread in Guwahati

GUWAHATI: On instructions from union home minister Amit Shah, Assam will make its Covid-19 testing pattern more aggressive and outrun the fast spreading virus in Guwahati, where the situation has been assessed to be critical by centre.
“The home minister called me yesterday and conveyed centre’s assessment that the situation in Guwahati is critical and instructed me to change our testing pattern and ramp it up to 10,000 tests per day or else we will be left far behind by the virus that is fast spreading,” state health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said.
Sarma said that between June 24 and 30 Guwahati alone has recorded 1212 positive cases and it is counting. “The symptomatic cases are rising in Guwahati and if citizens continue with the way they are following the lockdown rules, we expect that Guwahati’s graph will flatten by July 10,” he said.
As the first step towards ramping up tests in the city having over 11 lakh population, the state is being equipped with two lakh new testing kits called Q COVID-19 Ag detection kit, which is a point-of-care test performed outside labs on nasal swab samples that detects antigens found on or within the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“In next two to four days we are introducing a new testing kit called Q COVID-19 Ag detection kit and tests results will be obtained between 15 minutes to one hour. If the result is positive, it is confirmed but if the result is negative then we carry out a second test, this time by the existing RT-PCR method,” Sarma said.
The new kit developed by the South Korean company, SD Biosensor, has moderate sensitivity and will give the actual Covdi-19 result unlike the highly sensitive RT-PCR tests which detects all infections, including influenza like illness (ILI) and severe acute respiratory infections (SARI).
Sarma said that it is not feasible to keep mildly symptomatic patients in home isolation because not everyone has separate toilets and bathrooms at their homes. “Even if they have separate toilets, still it is not advisable because of a patient’s conditions deteriorates all of sudden, a doctor may not be available immediately,” Sarma said.
“As a relaxation, we are allowing patients to get cooked food from their home delivered at the hospitals in disposable containers,” Sarma added.
In addition, Guwahati Medical College and Hospital is setting up a plasma bank for treatment of the serious patients, Sarma added.
He said that all the positive cases reported in the city has come up during the targeted surveillance and voluntary testing programme launched on June 15. “The union home minister has asked me to conduct 10,000 tests every day. He has done it in Delhi but it is a huge task here in Guwahati because that large number of people may not come to give their samples every day. We expect anything between 2000 and 4000 tests every day,” Sarma added.
Sarma said that the state has completed 4.12 lakh tests in the state and the tests per million is 11,750, which is the third highest figure in the country after Andhra Pradesh (16,000) and Tamil Nadu (14,000). “Our tests per million is 100% more than that in Kerala,” he added.