Coronavirus: Meghalaya to close all entry points for a week for 3 months

Guwahati: Amid murmurs of community transmission of the coronavirus in Meghalaya's capital city of Shillong, the state government has decided to close all entry points to the state for 1 week every month in the next 3 months.

This move has been taken to reduce the heavy burden on the state's frontline workers amid a massive boom in the number of coronavirus cases. The state's health machinery has now focused much of its efforts towards conducting random rapid antigen tests in the state to gauge the extent of the virus transmission in the state.

Tweeting in this regard, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma wrote, "Government has decided to close all entry points to #Meghalaya for 1 week every month in the next 3 months starting Sept 2020. This is being done to unburden our health, frontline workers, and the respective District Administration engaged in intensive surveillance for Covid 19."

However, the Chief Minister did not provide any specifications and dates regarding when this exercise will be brought into effect.

A total of 63 more people, including 49 security personnel, have tested positive for Covid-19 in Meghalaya, taking the northeastern state's tally to 1,598, a health official said on Thursday.

50 of these cases have been reported from the East Khasi Hills district, where the rate of infection is much higher in comparison to the other districts.

Yesterday, the state's health minister, Al Hek said that the recent spurt in cases in the state capital Shillong is indicative of a spread at the community level. "To check the spread of the contagion, our Government has been conducting random tests daily since the onset of August. For the past couple of weeks or so, we have started detecting 10-12 cases of COVID-19 in Shillong. Although we cannot say with certainty that the virus is spreading in the community, it is certainly indicative of that", Hek told The Sentinel Digital.

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