Migrants now account for 59% of Bihar’s tally, Delhi returnees biggest chunk

The percentage of Covid-19 cases among those tested has doubled after the migrants began returning home from May 3.

The percentage of Covid-19 cases among those tested has doubled after the migrants began returning home from May 3.

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Of the 58,905 samples tested till Friday, 3.57% (2,105) have reported positive for the virus. As on May 3, when Sharmik Special trains started running, the figure was 1.79%.

“In the last one week, (May 15-May 21), the number of new infections has grown by an average 13% every day,” said Bihar’s principal secretary, health, Uday Singh Kumawat, in a tweet Friday. He replaced Sanjay Kumar, after the government issued orders on May 20, swapping their positions, and sending Kumar to the tourism department.

In Bihar, 17 out of every 1 million people have now tested positive for the virus.

The migrants now account for 59% of the state’s total Covid-19 cases,which stood at 2,105 till Friday noon, 1242 of which were attributed to the migrants. “Of these, 1184 have returned to Bihar after May 3,” said health secretary Lokesh Kumar Singh.

Giving a break-up, he said, “Of the migrants testing positive, 333 have returned from Delhi, 293 from Maharashtra and 212 from Gujarat.”

Eighty of the migrants testing positive for the virus had returned from Haryana, followed by West Bengal (62), Rajasthan (45), Uttar Pradesh (41), Telangana (38), Karnataka (19), Tamil Nadu (14), and Madhya Pradesh (10) among some other states.

Bihar has done well to contain the spread of the virus by setting up block quarantine centres to house migrants there for 14 days before allowing them to go home. Till Thursday, the state had set up 10,353 block quarantine camps, where 7.45 lakh people were residing. It is here that samples of symptomatic ones and others, picked up randomly, are being collected for testing against the virus.

As of May 21, Bihar was testing 466 out of every 1 million people.

Among the migrants, Bihar had tested only 1.57% (8,337) of the 5.30 lakh, who returned to the state till May 18.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has already directed his health officials to ramp up testing facilities from an average 2,000 to 10,000 per day, and to test as many migrants as possible.

On Thursday, a total of 2,920 samples were tested in the state after eight health facilities in districts were recently equipped with TrueNat and CB-NAAT machines.

“Preventing the migrants from directly going homes, after reaching the state, has helped us contain the spread of the virus,” said Anupam Kumar, secretary information and public relations department. Bihar has one of the highest population densities in India (1,106 persons/sq km, as per Census 2011).

With almost 85% asymptomatic cases, Bihar has done well to segregate isolation centres depending on symptomatic, asymptomatic and cases with mild symptoms.

Around 2,300 beds have been earmarked at the three designated Covid-19 special hospitals of the state government that include the Nalanda Medical College Hospital, Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College Hospital (Gaya) and the Jawahar Lal Nehru Medical College Hospital in Bhagalpur. The AIIMS-Patna, with around 1,000 beds, is also taking up Covid-19 patients.

The Covid-19 special hospitals are for symptomatic and serious patients. The ones with mild symptoms are kept at the district Covid care centres, while the government has also taken up hotels and converted them into institutional isolation/quarantine centres for asymptomatic cases.

Bihar has earmarked 17,928 isolation beds and 13,464 quarantine rooms to take up the challenge posed by the pandemic.