Jharkhand has been seeing a gradual spike in Covid cases over the last two-and-a-half weeks with more than half the total Covid-19 cases reported in the tribal state so far are that of migrant workers who returned home.
'Almost all the new Covid-19 cases reported in Jharkhand since May 5 are that of migrant workers,' said state health secretary Nitin Madan Kulkarni. 'The rate of transmission was so high among migrant workers that we had to create a dedicated column in our daily Covid-19 bulletin only for data related to migrants who tested positive,' he added.
According to a Covid-19 report released by the National Health Mission (NHM) on Wednesday afternoon, at least 437 cases of coronavirus infection have surfaced in Jharkhand so far, and 252 of them are migrant workers who returned to their home state after May 5.
A senior health official, requesting anonymity, said that Jharkhand might have overcome the pandemic in many districts had the exodus of migrant workers from other states not caused an unprecedented surge in cases.
At least 52 Covid-19 cases have been reported in Gumla district so far, and 49 of them are migrant workers, the NHM report said. Similarly, there are 11 active cases in East Singhbhum and all of them are migrant workers. Besides, out of the 45 cases reported in Hazaribagh so far, 39 are migrant workers, the NHM report noted.
While social media has been abuzz with videos and pictures of migrant workers returning home on foot, not many could have estimated how their return could cause an explosion of Covid-19 cases in states like Jharkhand, said a senior health official, who is an active member of the state’s task force for fighting the pandemic.
Jharkhand is one of the key source states from where workers migrate to the rest of India. With a tribal population of 26 per cent, Jharkhand is also best with poverty, illiteracy, lack of resources and superstition.
'It is important to identify and screen each and every migrant returning to the state, or the virus may spread in villages here, which could cause great trouble,' said Dr Prabhat Kumar, the head of the Covid-19 task force in Jharkhand.
Test record
The state government has so far collected 60,951 swab samples from across Jharkhand, and more than 430 of thesehave tested positive.
At least 53,309 of the 60,000-odd samples collected have been tested so far, the NHM report said. Most of the migrant workers who tested positive for Covid-19 are below the age of 40, health officials said.
Worker dead
A migrant worker returning to Bardhaman district of West Bengal from Maharashtra died at Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ranchi on Tuesday evening.
'He met with an accident and was brought here for treatment. We got him tested for Covid-19, and his report came out positive,' said RIMS director D.K. Singh.
