GUWAHATI, May 24 - As the number of COVID-19 cases rose dramatically over the last three days touching 378 on Sunday, the State government has ramped up its testing facilities. Till date, 59553 tests have been conducted in the seven labs in the State, surpassing the numbers in Kerala.
�Our per-day testing capacity has reached 2,500. We hope it will increase further in a week�s time. The labs have switched over from manual extraction of swabs to automatic extraction,� Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said at a press briefing.
Automatic extraction machines have been pooled in from various institutions and made available at the medical colleges.
As the flight operations resume tomorrow, the government has also accredited three private labs to conduct COVID-19 tests.
The minister said that 90 per cent of the positive cases detected so far were from quarantine centres and 4,000 random tests conducted under the Community Surveillance Programme in 25,000 villages have indicated that the virus has not spread to the rural areas so far. Hojai district has registered the highest number of cases � over 77 � while Dhemaji has not recorded a single case as yet.
Nearly 280 of the COVID-19 patients in the State have travel history, and the majority of them had returned from Maharashtra (over 108 cases). Returnees from Delhi (over 34 cases), Tamil Nadu (over 30) and West Bengal (over 33) are among those who tested positive.
So far, 44,000 people have returned by road to the State and 16,384 by train.
Sarma further said 5,000 hospital beds can be made available to treat COVID-19 patients, but the department was working according to a strategy and unfolding the facilities one at a time.
�Even now, we are at a position to accommodate 1,000 patients. We already have 2,000 doctors and 210 others have volunteered their services. At present we are not worried about our infrastructure and adequacy of medical staff,� he said.
The Jagiroad Paper Mill Hospital of HPCL has been converted into fully functional unit for COVID-19. At Morigaon Civil Hospital, a 23-bed COVID unit has been kept ready for any eventuality.
The government is also considering converting the Jalukbari Ayurvedic College as full-fledged COVID-19 Hospital.
