A 76-year-old man who spent more than 14 days of quarantine in a hospital after he was declared COVID-19 positive due to a technical error, died in his Meghalaya village on June 26.
The hill State’s first ‘false positive’ patient died of asthmatic complications.
The man from Umsamlem village in Ri-Bhoi district was admitted at the Dr. H Gordon Roberts Hospital in State capital Shillong in the first week of June. The doctors undertook the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR test after diagnosing him with acute respiratory infection.
He was declared positive on June 9, following which the Health department carried out contact-tracing in his village as well as in Shillong. The outcome of all tests, including a few more on the septuagenarian, was negative.
The State Medical Expert Committee later said the man’s was a case of ‘false positive’ due to the error factor of the RT-PCR testing kit.
Aman War, the Director of Health Services said the machines through which the RT-PRC tests were being conducted have an accuracy rate of 99%.
“This particular case fell under the 1% error of the machine and hence the man from Ri-Bhoi was categorised as false positive,” he added.
Consultants at the hospital where the man was admitted released him on June 22. “He passed away around 5:30 pm on June 26 ,” said one of his relatives.
‘48 cases in the State’
Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma said the State recorded 48 COVID-19 positive cases till June 27. Five of them were active while one person, a 69-year-old doctor, died.
The COVID-19 death count in Assam touched double figure on June 27 with the death of a woman at the Gauhati Medical College and Hospital late night on June 26.
With 246 fresh cases on June 27, Assam’s COVID-19 positive count read 7,165. While 2,338 of these are active cases, 4,814 were discharged after recovery.
