Now, Giridih gets free from Covid, Pakur finds new case

PAKUR, WHICH BECAME FREE FROM COVID-19 IN DEC LAST YEAR, REPORTED A NEW CASE ON FEB 4

RANCHI: After remaining free from coronavirus infection for over a month, Jharkhand’s Pakur district has once again discovered a new positive case while Giridih district joined the list of infection-free districts this week.

Pakur, which became free from coronavirus on December 24 last year, reported one positive case on February 4.

“The district remained free from coronavirus infection for almost one-and-a-half month. However, we did not slow down the pace of treatment during this period. We have now asked the new patient to get admitted in the hospital for speedy recovery and effective containment of the spread of the disease,” said Pakur civil surgeon Dr Ramdev Paswan.

Giridih district, on the other hand, became free of the contagion after discharge of its lone patient on February 2.

The district health officials, however, feel focus be laid on testing through real time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the golden test for detecting SARS-COV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

“Effective surveillance and contact tracing exercises have yielded positive results. The district is now free from the contagion. However, we are stressing on increasing testing through RT-PCR, as it has been noticed that people refrained from opting this test due to delay in results. We send the samples to Dhanbad for testing. Nearly 80% of the tests are being done through TrueNat,” said Giridih civil surgeon Dr Siddharth Sanyal.

Explaining further, he added, “People here have less travel history due to no direct connection through Railways. Moreover, herd immunity must have developed after passage of several months of the break out of the pandemic. After vaccination, the spread of the disease would be fairly checked.”

The Covid-19 growth trajectory in Jharkhand took a declining trend after September mid last year. Since then, it never went upward as daily detection of positive cases across the state is on a continuous decline.

The state’s recovery rate has gone up to 98.72% and number the of active cases has gone down to below 500.

Of the 24 districts in the state, 16 have active cases in single digit. However, the maximum number of active cases are concentrated in state capital Ranchi alone, which has 198 cases, accounting for 44.89% of the state’s total 441 cases.

The daily detection of cases in the state for the last 15 days too has come down to two digits, with around 65% discovery from Ranchi alone.

According to the state health department’s February 5 bulletin, the state has thus far reported a total of 118,938 cases, including 117,420 recoveries, 441 active cases and 1,077 deaths.