Raipur:
A 58-year-old migrant labourer tested positive for coronavirus in Chhattisgarh’s Surajpur district on Tuesday, taking the number of active cases in the state to four, a health official said.
The state has reported 38 cases of COVID-19 so far, of which 34 patients have been discharged after recovering from the infection.
The swab sample of a labourer, hailing from Garhwa district in the neighbouring state of Jharkhand, was sent for testing to Pt Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Medical College in Raipur, Surajpur collector Deepak Soni told PTI.
This is the first confirmed case of coronavirus detected in the state’s Surguja division, which consists of five districts.
The patient, who works as a labourer at Wardha in Maharashtra, had travelled to the border district of Rajnandgaon along with other labourers during the lockdown early this month, the official said.
He was placed in a quarantine facility on the inter- state border, but in view of crowding at the facility, migrant workers, most of them hailing from Jharkhand, were shifted to the quarantine centre in Surajpur on April 17, he said.
“We collected random samples from people at the quarantine centre to check for the infection, following which his report came out positive,” the collector said, adding that the patient was undergoing treatment at Ambikapur Medical College in Surguja district.
Samples of people who had come in contact with the patient will also be sent for testing, he added.
With this, the state has so far recorded 38 cases of coronavirus, of which 34 have been discharged following recovery and three, apart from the labourer, were undergoing treatment at AIIMS Raipur, a health official said.
