E-Paper
5 patients tested Covid-19 positive in March yet to recover
Ghaizabad:
Ghaizabad:
Five out of eight patients who were found positive for Covid-19 in late March are yet be discharged from various hospitals in the district. Health officials have raised concerns over this and said they are conducting regular tests of these patients to get two consecutive negative reports needed to declare them negative for Sars-Cov-2.
According to the officials, the five patients include a 30-year-old man from Vaishali who has a travel history to Dubai and tested positive on March 26. The other is a 32-year-old employee of Noida-based company -- Ceasefire – who tested positive on March 26. Another case is of a couple from Savior Park high-rise at Mohan Nagar who were found Covid-19 positive on March 28. The fifth case is of a 34-year-old man from Duhai who was tested positive on March 31 after he came in contact with a positive patient.
“This effect could be a result of high viral load. We possibly picked up the five persons when the infection was not at its peak. It takes about seven to eight days when the infection reaches its peak and takes another 10-12 days to decline. However, we are yet to get two consecutive negative reports of these five patients. In between, some test reports also got delayed and we are following up regularly,” said Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer, Ghaziabad.
Gupta said that two doctors from Max Hospital, Vaishali, who tested positive for coronavirus on April 14 and April 17, were found negative and discharged on April 20.
“The two resident doctors of Max Hospital were discharged within couple of days. This may seem early, but the two could be cases where the infection was on decline and their two consecutive reports turned negative. They were sent home on Monday evening. One of the doctors who resides in Vaishali had to face resistance from locals. So, we had to take help from the police and administration and the patient was moved to his house,” the CMO said.
A Max Hospital spokesperson termed the incident with one of its doctors as unfortunate, and said that the community was allegedly stigmatising health care workers instead of extending support.
“After a week of their quarantining at the facility, two consecutive samples, collected from both doctors within 24 hours, tested negative. Hence, they have been discharged and asked to home quarantine for 14 days. Both the junior doctors were stable throughout their course of stay at the Covid-19 facility,” the spokesperson said.
Till Tuesday evening, the total number of Covid-19 cases in Ghaziabad district stood at 46 and 13 of them were discharged from different hospitals. Gupta said that there was no new addition to the tally on Tuesday and the district at present has 33 active cases.
Overall in the state, the total number of positive cases shot up to 1,294 and 140 persons discharged from different hospitals.
“We now have a total of 1,134 active cases in UP. We will be introducing pool testing in different districts where the positive cases are less or in buffer zones outside the containment areas. We have also observed that maximum cases are coming from persons who are already in quarantine with us. So, we have been able to contain the outspread,” said Amit Mohan Prasad, UP’s principal secretary (health).
The UP government on Tuesday also issued an order in which district magistrates have been directed to ensure that schools should not force students to deposit three months’ fees in advance, or debar students from online studies. Besides,the schools cannot take any steps to strike off the names of students, the order said.
The communication by principal secretary Ardhana Shukla also stated that some schools were demanding the transport fees even though the schools are closed during the lockdown period. In her communication, she has directed that no transport fees should be charged by schools during the lockdown period.
