A woman, who was the first patient of the coronavirus disease in Gujarat’s hardest-hit Ahmedabad city, has gone home after spending a month in a hospital.
She was discharged from the hospital on Saturday after completely recovering from Covid-19, according to news agency ANI.
“I was hospitalised on March 17 and now finally getting discharged after testing negative twice. It has been a long journey,” the woman was quoted as saying by ANI.
On the day the woman left the hospital, the western state reported its highest single-day spike of 280 Covid-19 cases. The number of infected people in the state shot up to 1376, while the death toll rose by 12 to 53 on Saturday.
Ahmedabad alone accounted for 239 new detections on Saturday. With the new cases of the coronavirus disease and five deaths, the tally of Gujarat’s largest city stands at 862 and the number of the victims at 25, a health department official said.
“Most of these cases have been reported from hotspot areas in Ahmedabad, mainly due to concentrated testing,” Jayanti Ravi, principal secretary (health), said.
“Among the affected localities are Behrampura, Chandlodia, Dariyapur, Danilimda, Manekchowk, Ellis bridge, Ishanpur, Navrangpura, Motera, Nikol, Saraspur, Gomtipur, Jamalpur, Astodia, and Kubenagar,” Ravi said.
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Health authorities said they could not begin the treatment of critical Covid-19 patients in Ahmedabad hospitals.
“We are awaiting permission from the ethics committee of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). We have found one donor and recipient also for plasma therapy, but it needs to be checked whether the required parameters of both individuals match or not,” Ravi said.
Twenty-seven Covid-19 patients have also been discharged from hospitals in the city.
Around 13,000 samples have been tested in the city, the highest in the state, as part of a proactive testing approach of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. The corporation has also roped in private laboratories and deployed mobile vans to ramp up testing.
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“Extensive surveillance by health workers has helped us find new cases, which reduced the possibility of cases in lakhs and deaths in thousands. We conducted aggressive testing, from 25-30 per day to 1500-2000, that too by approaching people at their houses,” municipal commissioner Vijay Nehra said, according to PTI.
“The situation is still worsening because we have not been able to make people aware completely,” he added.
Authorities have imposed curfew in parts of Ahmedabad’s walled city area and localities like Danilimda and Behrampura to contain the spread of the coronavirus infections.
