No trains chug in, but South Corona warriors kept busy with Covid tests

| MAY 20, 2020, 02:23 AM IST
No trains chug in, but South Corona warriors kept busy with Covid tests

the goan I network

MARGAO 

Not a single passenger, either from Delhi or elsewhere, disembarked at the Margao railway station on Tuesday. Only the two trains carrying closed to 3000-odd migrants from Uttar Pradesh departed from the Margao railway station in the evening.

That, however, did not give respite to the Covid warriors working almost non-stop at the South Goa district hospital. After testing hundreds of train passengers ferried by the Rajdhanis to Goa during the weekend, the road ahead is a long drawn one for these warriors.

The healthcare workers at the district hospital now continue to work non-stop finishing the Covid tests on the passengers, who had come in contact with the positive cases in the Rajdhani trains.

Sources in the know said the Corona warriors carried out around 117 Covid tests on Tuesday, mostly on the passengers who were travelling in the same coaches in which positive cases were detected. 

Besides, Covid tests are also conducted by the health teams manning the district hospital on persons, who have arrived into the state via the borders at Polem and Molem.

“Our work is not over yet. There were no trains on Tuesday, but we had to conduct as many as 117 tests of passengers who had travelled in the coaches along with the positive cases,” remarked a health official. The part-commissioned district hospital has come in handy for the district authorities to carry out mass testing of the train passengers during the last three days. While the district hospital had carried out the tests non-stop on Saturday till Sunday morning, the authorities decided to send some of the swab samples to the hospitals at Ponda and Azilo. 

“We had no option but to send some of swab samples of the train passengers on Sunday to Ponda and Azilo hospitals to ensure that the reports did not take long and came early,” a health official said.

Deputy Health Director Dr Ira Almeida said that the system put in place at the district hospital to take swabs and conduct Covid tests is functioning as expected. “Time was consumed in the exercise since the health teams constituted at the hospital had to first take the swab samples of hundreds of passengers and then conduct tests on each of these,” she added.


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