GUWAHATI: One-third decline in fresh Covid cases in Assam has come as a major relief although health experts have expressed caution with 90% of the cases being detected outside the state capital.
Six districts — Cachar, Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Sonitpur and Nagaon — have been put on alert to check the spread of the virus which is going to be the key in containing the second wave of the pandemic.
The headquarters of all these districts are major transit and commercial hubs.
In Assam, the daily cases have come down two-third of what it was 10 days ago.
If the declining trend continues for the next five days, Assam may end up with less than 2,000 cases per day, health officials said.
“When we had 6,000 cases daily, about 25% cases were concentrated in Guwahati.
Now, out of the total daily cases, less than 10% is in Guwahati.
This means the disease has spread all over,” Assam’s National Health Mission (NHM) director Dr Lakshmanan S told TOI on Wednesday.
He said the spread of Covid-19 in districts was worrying as health staff needed to be spread out to track new cases.
“When the rural areas get effected by the virus, the need arises to spread out the health workers than concentrating in particular pockets,” he added.
Senior health officials felt that as the second wave hit Assam after the north and western parts of the country were impacted, the surge of new cases in rural areas of the state has been a delayed phenomenon.
“Districts that are well connected with rail, bus and air route has been the worst effected after the situation in Kamrup (metropolitan) district and Guwahati has shown improvement.
We have put best efforts to bring out the positive cases through contact tracing,” said a senior health official.
“From Guwahati, people travelled to the districts just before the inter-district travel was banned.
They carried the virus from the city and it was spread to the villages,” he added.
On Wednesday, the highest number of cases that was recorded came from Tinsukia in upper Assam as 415 new cases were detected.
Next came Kamrup (Metropolitan) with 383 cases, followed by 313 in Dibrugarh and 294 in Nagaon district.
Even as the state’s positivity rate was stable at 4.06%, the number of Covid fatalities have gone up to 61 from Tuesday’s 51.
Hill district of Karbi Anglong reported the highest number of deaths at five.
However, the recovery rate improved to 86.70% when compared to Tuesday’s 86.51%.
Total 1.02 lakh tests have been conducted in Assam on Wednesday.
Currently the state has 51,061 active cases, while 4,389 patients were discharged.
This was marginally down from 51,333 active cases as of Tuesday.