PANAJI
Health officials overseeing Goa's response to the pandemic went into a tizzy on Wednesday-Thursday with as many as eleven of the recent arrivals from the United Kingdom, where a deadlier and more contagious variant of the dreaded coronavirus has injected a new dimension to the disease globally, testing positive through the RT-PCR test.
Officials as per the fresh guidelines from the Union Health Ministry have sent the samples of these eleven Covid-19 patients who arrived from the UK for further genome analysis to the National Institute of Virology (NIV) at Pune. This is mandated by the new SOPs to ascertain whether they are infected by the new mutated strain of the dreaded virus or not.
State's Health Minister said, all these eleven patients from the UK will be admitted to the ESI hospital at Margao and kept under "separate isolation" but until then almost all of them were at home which officials said was a cause for worry.
Nine of the 900-odd passengers who arrived recently on flights from the UK had tested positive immediately while two others developed symptoms later and then tested positive.
Rane said: "As discussed with Dr Bandekar and Dr D’Sa it is proposed to keep them in ESI hospital since all those who have tested positive are supposed to be kept in separate institutional isolation. Their swab sample will be sent to National Institute of Virology(NIV), Pune."
Meanwhile, Goa's health teams were still on the job to trace all of the 900-odd passengers who arrived from the UK from December 9 onwards so as to follow the guideline of conducting RT-PCR tests on all of them.
A senior doctor who wished not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media told The Goan that as far as possible it would be prudent to conduct a thorough contact-tracing exercise of all these people who arrived recently from the UK.
"It is better to nip this scare and threat arising out of this new mutated strain of the dreaded virus. We know what has happened because we were not careful in the early days. It won't take time for things to go beyond control with this new mutated variant as well," the senior doctor said.
Passengers being monitored, no janata curfew: CM
PANAJI: Chief Minister Pramod Sawant denied reports that there were plans to impose a 'Janata Curfew' in the backdrop of nearly 1000 people arriving in Goa on flights from the United Kingdom since December 9.
"There are no specific guidelines from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in this regard. But let's wait and see what further instructions we get," Sawant said, adding that all these 990-odd people who have come from the UK are being monitored.
He said, if any of the recently arrived passengers from UK display even mild symptoms, they will be put in under institutional isolation.
Task Force for introduction of Covid vaccine
PANAJI: The State government has constituted a 'Task Force' and has notified it on Thursday for the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Apart from bureaucrats the Task Force also includes functionaries from the local setups of National youth organisations like the National Cadet Corps (NCC), Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan (NYKS) and the National Service Scheme (NSS).
Meanwhile, the DHS Covid-19 bulletin said, 90 new cases were detected among 1,677 samples tested in the 24-hour period of Wednesday-Thursday.
Also one patient - a 68-year-old Merces resident - died in the same 24-hour period. His death was recorded within 10 hours of being admitted to the Goa Medical College and Hospital, the bulletin said. There were 88 recoveries.
