New guidelines say only symptomatic patients will be tested for coronavirus (File)
With Assam witnessing its highest spike of 22 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, that too from Guwahati, a green zone, and at a time when the special passenger trains are arriving with stranded people from outside, the state government has tweaked its quarantine protocol and has come up with a strict SOP. The state has witnessed a 34 per cent jump in the number of cases on Thursday and this week its doubling rate has narrowed down to 8.64 days, raising concerns.
According to the new SOP, once the passenger manifest is out, they will be called to find out minute details about their address in Assam. Symptomatic passengers will be immediately segregated at the screening area on arrival and sent to the isolation ward in hospitals. Asymptomatic passengers will be sent to mandatory facility quarantine only on government vehicles.
The SOP also added that tests of only symptomatic patients will take place and the results will be shared in a maximum of seven days.
Those whose results are negative will be sent to a home quarantine with stamps on both hands and their houses will be treated as containment zone with no access to the outside world and the quarantine the period will be of four days, the SOP listed.
Assam might be bracing for hard times with the doubling rate dipping to 8.64 days from 12.07 days just yesterday.
Off the 22 fresh cases, 15 were detected in Fancy Bazar, the heart of commercial activities of Guwahati on Wednesday, while the rest seven, who were cancer and heart patients and their attendees who had come from Mumbai and were quarantined in Guwahati, detected COVID positive on Thursday afternoon, officials further added.
All the 15 from Fancy Bazar are secondary contact to a patient, also a resident of Fancy Bazar whose source of contamination has not been traced yet.
This is the second wave of contaminations for Assam that had recorded its first among the Tablighi attendees and their secondary contacts. Assam has over 75 percent asymptomatic coronavirus positive cases.