COVID Pandemic Hits Northeast

Like the rest of the country, the Northeast also had to put everything else on hold to contain the spread of COVID 2019

- ENe Bureau

In March, when the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, first announced a country-wide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID 2019, there were no confirmed cases in the Northeast. However, in order to prepare for a possible outbreak, State governments quickly got to work on building quarantines centers, selecting possible treatment facilities, getting testing centers approved, and more. Sure enough, within a few weeks, reports of confirmed cases started pouring in from different States from the region. We take a look at the COVID 2019 graph in Northeast and how the State governments have responded to the pandemic.

Assam

Out of all the Northeast states, Assam has reported the most number of cases to date*. The total number of cases at the time of filing this report was 7165, with 2338 active cases. A total of 4814 people have recovered so far, and the State has reported 10 deaths.

From the first lockdown, the BJP government pulled all stops to contain the virus, and both the Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, have received a lot of positive feedback from the people of Assam. In fact, Himanta Biswa Sarma was likely the first minister from the region who started sharing realtime updates on his social media accounts to help people keep a track of the spread. His effort to reach out to the public and spread reliable information about the virus is quite commendable. In addition to that, he also helped many people in despair across the State reach out to the local administration in cases of emergency.