Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has said that 11 Coronavirus positive patients have tested negative after the expiry of the incubation period on Sunday and they will be discharged from hospitals on Monday.
The final tests on the 11 patients who were all foreign returnees have been completed. This has reduced the strength of patients still under treatment from 69 to 58, Mr. Rao told a press conference here on Sunday.
Answering a question on the death of a person with virus, he said the victim was not under treatment of the government. The virus was detected in post-mortem examination.
There were 25,937 persons still under surveillance of the government from a cut-off date. Of them, as many as 5,046 were in quarantine. They will all be left free from March 30 as per the expiry of 14 days of incubation. If no new cases were detected during the period, he said Telangana will achieve zero cases by April 7 but the government will not relax lockdown.
He expected less possibility of new cases as the airports were closed and there was no way of transmission by foreign returnees. The only possibility of transmission was from local communities. Therefore, the collectors were told at Sunday’s video conference to enforce home quarantine strictly.
The government was building up a pool of doctors, nurses and lab technicians to continue the efforts.
Complimenting the good discipline exhibited by people to check the spread of coronavirus so far, he said the same might go haywire if farmers crowded foodgrains procurement centres from April 1. He appealed to villagers to open up fencing that they had put up to bar entry of outsiders.
He also said the teams that specialised in mounting harvesters on tractors will be identified in a few days to commence mechanised harvesting operations soon. The police will be asked to issue passes to three or four teams from every town for the work.
