JORHAT, May 13 - The Jorhat district unit of AASU has urged the district administration to reconsider the decision to use 10 hotels in the town here as paid quarantine centres for people returning home from outside the State to upper Assam districts since last Friday.
It may be mentioned here that a zonal screening centre at Kakodunga on the western outskirts here near Jorhat-Golaghat border has been set up�to screen people coming from outside the State to six districts of upper Assam.
After screening people and collection of swabs they are accommodated at a transit camp opened at an educational institute till results of COVID-19 test were out or shifted to paid quarantines in 10 hotels in the town.
Expressing serious concern over allowing returnees coming from outside Assam, especially from areas mostly-affected by the novel coronavirus, the organising secretary of AASU central committee, Jul Khound and assistant secretary of Jorhat district unit of AASU Bijoy Shankar Bordoloi respectively urged the district administration to reconsider the decision of allowing paid quarantine in hotels in the town as most of the hotels were in residential and thickly- populated localities.
They said there was apprehension of transmission of the dreaded disease if a person quarantined in hotel tested positive.�
Both the students� body leaders pointed out that hotels were not only in market areas but in residential areas also.
Moreover, if a person in a hotel is tested positive then a large area may have to be declared a containment zone as done in Guwahati and in other districts of the State where people tested positive for COVID-19, the duo observed.
Bordoloi said that several AASU office-bearers had met a few senior officials of the district administration in this regard and urged for reconsideration of the decision.
40 stranded people sent back to West Bengal: Forty people of Murshidabad district of West Bengal who were stranded in Majuli due to lockdown on Tuesday were sent back to their home district in two buses arranged by the Majuli district administration.
A Majuli district administration official informed that the 40 people involved in small businesses who came to the Brahmaputra island prior to lockdown period after conducting health check-up�left the island in two buses with 20 each in a bus.
The official said that the Majuli district administration had provided essential food and other relief materials to the stranded people of neighbouring State during the lockdown period.
