SHILLONG, Jan 5: With COVID-19 cases in Meghalaya seeing an upward trend and in the wake of the Omicron variant of the virus penetrating the hill state, the Congress has appealed to the state government to convene a meeting with opposition leaders and jointly deliberate over measures to check the spread of ‘the variant of concern’ in the state.
“We need to put our minds together to ensure that the situation does not aggravate or goes out of hands. The people of the state have already suffered in the past two years due to COVID-19,” Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader, Ampareen Lyngdoh, said on Wednesday. She suggested that there is a need to expedite the process of detecting Omicron variant as testing the strains entails sending samples to Kolkata.
According to her, deciding on the quarantine and incubation periods will not be possible if reports are made available to the patients after 10-12 days. “We need to introduce methods for containing the virus keeping in mind that today alone 50 new cases have been reported. In the past three days, there has been surge from two cases to 32 cases and now it has reached 50 cases,” Lyngdoh said.
She said that lest the COVID situation goes out of hand, board examinations, along with the education of children, might be affected.
“We would like to know the model which the government will adopt, keeping in mind loss of formal education in the last two years,” the CLP leader said.