Post-lockdown, Assam plans ‘entry permit’
Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma here on Monday said that they have not found any positive case in last 48 hours but still some persons out of the total 831 who visited Tablighi Jamaat Markaz are hiding, forcing the government to take stringent measure to lodge criminal cases against them.
Pointing out that state government has decided to register cases against them under the Disaster Management Act and the IPC, the minister announced that they have already started working on a strategy to mitigate the crowd that may emerge on opening of the lockdown. Informing that a large number of state’s people living outside Assam would like to come back, the minister said that they are planning to issue “entry permit” to regulate their return to the state. “We are going to create a website soon on which people interested to come back will have to apply for the entry permit and authorities will allow only limited enteries per day so that they could be checked and if required, quarantined,” said the minister.
The minister said that they have completed 2,000 sample testings out of which 1,809 were found negative. “We got 26 positive cases so far and result of 165 samples is awaited,” said the minister while admitting that their 25 positive cases were linked to Markaz only.
He also pointed out that government of India had sent four lists of 556 people who attended the religious congregation of Tablighi Jamaat Markaz in Delhi but locally Assam police and administration identified another lot of 275 persons who attended the same religious congregation but were not the part of that list.
“We have collected the sample of 491 who attended the religious congregation and 128 more samples are yet to be collected. We have set the deadline of Monday for them to cooperate with the administration by making themselves available for medical checkup,” said the minister who admitted that they are yet to find the connection through which Manish Tibrewal was infected as his travel history doesn’t have any recent link to any hotspot of Covid-19.
Informing that they have quarantined the ap-artment the minister said that they have collected 98 samples of people who came in touch with
Manish Tibrewal but 85 have tested negative.
“Even after tasting negative we have kept 118 people in quarantine,” said the minister revealing that they are going to free 75,981 people in next two days from home quarantine notice.
About the preparedness of state health department, the minister said that they have the stock of 3941 PPE, 36487 N-95 mask and 728022 triple layer mask. “We are expecting to get 5000 PPE soon,” the minister said.