Vijayawada: A 25-year-old youth from the temple town of Srikalahasti tested positive for Covid-19. He recently returned from London and developed symptoms on March 20. This took the number of positive cases to eight in the state.
According to a release from the director of health and family welfare, a man aged 25 years arrived to Chennai from London on March 18 by Flight BA35 at 11.30 pm and travelled by car to Sriakalahasti at 3 am on March 19. He developed symptoms on March 23 and was admitted in the Ruia Hospital at Tirupati on the same day.
As many as 453 new foreign returnees arrived in the state and all of were are kept under strict isolation and were being monitored. All labs were made functional 24x7 from Tuesday and an order was placed for equipment required for three more labs set up at Kadapa, Visakhapatnam and Guntur.
Dedicated teams and GPS-enabled vehicles were working for sample collection while 12,131 beds are arranged at district and sub-district levels for quarantine facility. A senior officer has been deployed at government hospital, labs and quarantine facilities and special officers at madnal level were deputed to monitor the follow-up of foreign returnees.
All village and ward secretaries were assigned 10 foreign returnees each to monitor home isolation twice a day. Principals of medical colleges were empowered to recruit manpower to increase capacity of labs to handle 1,000 samples a day.
As many as 14,907 foreign returnees were under surveillance in the state. A total of 13,290 persons were under home isolation while 2,723 completed 28 days of observation and 84 were in hospital.
A close contact of a Covid-19 positive patient with travel history from Madina admitted at TBCD Hospital, Visakhapatnam, tested negative. The total number of samples tested till March 23 were 168 and out of them seven tested positive. On Tuesday, 61 samples were tested and out of them, one tested positive. The results of 14 samples are still awaited.
Four labs located at Chittoor, Krishna, East Godavari and Anantapur started testing samples in two shifts and each lab can test 30 samples per shift in a day.
