SHILLONG, Jan 23: Meghalaya is witnessing a surge in COVID-19 cases but the state government has no plans to impose a lockdown.
“There is no such thing that the government is going to impose a lockdown,” Principal Secretary of Health and Family Welfare department, Sampath Kumar said on Sunday.
Stating that there are no COVID-19 patients admitted in the ICU of Shillong Civil Hospital, he said this is an indication that people are getting only mild infections and have been able to overcome with simple medication.
But he stressed that people with co-morbidities should take necessary precautions.
He disclosed that nearly 95-98% of the fresh cases are of the Omicron variant. The state’s overall positivity rate is 14.6% while the hospitalisation rate is less than 10%, he added.
“The strategy should be to protect the vulnerable, senior citizens and people with co-morbidities. The protection should be at individual as well as community-level. This strategy will help reduce the number of serious cases,” Kumar said.
Stressing also on vaccination, the Health official said there is a level of protection once a person is vaccinated.
He said Omicron is a highly-transmissible variant and advised people to follow all the protocols to reduce transmission.
On an average, Meghalaya had witnessed 300 plus cases every day when the Delta variant had hit state. The number of the cases now will increase since Omicron is more infectious, he said.
“We are anticipating a surge in the number of the cases in the next two weeks. Hopefully, the situation will improve slowly,” Kumar said.
One good thing now is that people are coming forward to get themselves tested if there are any symptoms. This is an encouraging sign, he said.
“We are also continuing with genome sequencing of the cases. It is difficult to do genome sequencing of all 300 samples every day. So, we are doing it on a few regularly,” Kumar said.