Strict screening

Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Saturday suggested that the Northeastern states with international borders need to take adequate measures at the borders to prevent COVID exposure by conducting screening of all individuals entering the region. The Union Minister is right, because, while most of the Northeastern states had very neatly managed the situation arising out of the global pandemic, it has been those people coming from outside the region who have carried the virus in most of the instances. That exactly is why barring Assam and Tripura, all the other states have remained virtually free from the virus spread. A few recent cases in Assam however have puzzled the authorities because the individuals had no travel history, until it was by and large established that such persons had contracted the virus from infected persons either directly or indirectly. The health and sanitation workers particularly fall in this category. But what has now gradually emerged as a problem is the arrival of people from outside the region. The two women who have tested positive in Jorhat, for instance, had travelled in an ambulance from Mumbai, and tested positive on arrival. Most alarmingly, the driver of the ambulance has also tested positive, and despite that he was permitted to leave Assam. Moreover, while the authorities are generally known to be keeping a vigil on the two National Highways which connect the Northeast with the rest of India, there are as any as nine village roads across the Assam-West Bengal border through which some people had allegedly sneaked into the region till a few weeks ago. The situation in Tripura on the other hand is becoming more worrisome every passing day, and it was on Sunday alone that as many as 30 persons have tested positive, taking the total number of such cases to 134. While 121 jawans of the Border Security Force (BSF) have been recovering from coronavirus in Tripura after a series of fresh cases surfaced from three battalions of the BSF in the last one week, 17 more jawans were tested positive on Saturday. Though no official conclusion has been arrived at on how the BSF personnel have contracted the virus at such a fast pace, there has been suggestions or suspicions that the virus had crossed over from Bangladesh. Tripura has about 65 km of unfenced boundary with Bangladesh, and it is in such areas that the BSF personnel have been affected the most.