Bengal’s Covid Count Jumps To 15, New Cases Include Infants

Bengal’s Covid-19 positive cases jumped to 15 Friday evening with five more persons, including a nine-month-old girl and her six-year-old sister, testing positive. This is also the first case of persons testing positive outside the state capital Kolkata.

All five are members of two closely related families who had travelled, along with eight other family members, to Delhi to meet a relative who had returned from the UK on March 16. Apart from the infant and her sister, their mother (27), an 11-year-old cousin brother and his mother (45) also tested positive.

The family returned by Rajdhani Express to Sealdah on March 20, travelled by a passenger train to Bethuadahari in Nadia district the same day and then took autorickshaws to reach their ancestral house at Tehatta in the same district.

On learning that their UK-returned relative had tested positive in Delhi, they went to a fever clinic at Tehatta where they were kept in isolation and their swab samples sent to Kolkata for tests. The swab samples of five of the 13 tested positive.

The patients were brought to Infectious Diseases Hospital (IDH) in Kolkata’s Beliaghata late Friday night. The state health department has started contact-tracing of all the people in Tehatta the family had come in touch with.

Railway authorities have been requested to provide details of the other passengers who travelled in the same Rajdhani coach from Delhi to Sealdah along with the affected family. The Uttarakhand health authorities have been alerted.

The eleven-year-old boy and his mother (45) live in Delhi and also decided to join the group traveling to Tehatta.

Doctors say treating the nine-month-old girl would pose a challenge since infants have very low immunity. This infant would be the second-youngest Covid-19 positive patient in the country, the first being an eight-month-old infant from J&K who tested positive.

Meanwhile, the condition of the 66-year-old Covid-19 patient who is undergoing treatment at the Peerless Hospital deteriorated Friday. He was put on ventilation from Thursday, but developed lung problems.

Peerless Hospital’s Sudipta Mitra said that the man has developed Covid-19 induced pneumonia and is in a critical condition on life support. He was treated with antiretroviral drugs, the first such line of treatment adopted in Bengal.

Seven of the other eight Covid-19 positive patients at the IDH are doing fine. IDH principal Anima Biswas said that the condition of a 58-year-old who has comorbidity (diabetes and hypertension) is a bit of concern.

One elderly Covid-19 patient died earlier this week at a private hospital in Salt Lake.