GUWAHATI: Living up to the challenge posed by huge inflow of state residents from outside Assam has ramped up testing facilities and achieved the milestone of testing over one lakh samples for COVID-19 in the state as on date even as it aims to achieve the target of two lakhs tests by June 14 next.
“We have succeeded to develop capacity to test 10,000 samples per day in the event of the challenges posed by inflow of stranded state residents from outside. So far we have tested over 1.04 lakh samples including about 4000 samples that were tested outside the state,” Assam Health Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma said.
He said with the improved capacity to test 10,000 samples a day, the test reports now will be available with 72 hours and that will lead to reduction of institutional quarantine period to four days from seven days. Hence, there will now be more focus on home quarantine and it will save substantial public money the state hast to spend for institutional quarantine per day per person.
The state is going to activate three more testing laboratories for COVID-19 in the next week even as it has increased the capacity for treatment of 4232 COVID-19 patients in hospital at a time. It now has 500 ICU beds and 957 isolation beds available.
Anticipating that there will be further spike in COVID-19 cases in the state because of continuous inflow of people from outside, Assam Health department has decided activate 50 Mahatma Gandhi Model Hospitals in rural areas with 50 bed per hospital for treating asymptomatic COVID-19 patients. It the process it will create 2500 hospital beds for COVID patients in the state. These hospitals will be ready by June 5-6.
The State Health Department has remodelled the COVID-19 treatment process. From now onwards highly symptomatic patients will be treated in Medical College Hospitals in the state, the patients with mild symptoms will be treated in district civil hospitals while asymptomatic patients will be treated in model hospitals in rural areas.
The Health Minister exuded confidence that recovery rate of COVID-19 patients in the state would increase further in days to come. He lauded the unrelenting tem efforts put up by the entire Team Assam in fighting the pandemic.