Fancy Bazaar wears a deserted look during the curfew hours in Guwahati on Thursday
GUWAHATI: The prolonged second wave in the northeast is mainly due to lack of Covid-appropriate behaviour and change in virus strains, health experts said.
Union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan has written to chief secretaries of Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Assam, Manipur, Sikkim and Odisha to take up strict containment measures, ramp up testing, augment health infrastructure besides ensuring effective clinical management.
Despite all efforts and advisories, the Covid-19 positivity rate in Manipur touched 19.11% on Thursday A total of 839 people tested positive out of total 4,390 samples tested in the last 24 hours. However, in bigger states like Assam, despite detection of more than 2,500 cases on Thursday, the positivity rate is 2.48% which is mostly due to the higher number of tests done.