The total number of COVID-19 positive cases has increased to 490 in Manipur with 339 of them active cases.
As the number of people arriving daily by flight has increased, the state government has requested the Civil Aviation ministry to suspend flight services for 10 days.
Since June 14 night, 32 persons have been confirmed COVID-19 positive with 20 cases confirmed at VRDLs in RIMS and 12 in JNIMS.
The cases are among returnees from other states. Officials said that all necessary medical precautionary measures have been taken.
On June 15, 60 patients were discharged from the hospitals after they recovered from the disease. Of them, 22 patients were released from RIMS and 38 from JNIMS.
The state government requested the Civil Aviation ministry to suspend the flights for 10 days from June 18-28 in view of the huge backlog of samples pending results.
Chief Secretary Suresh Babu said in an official letter that the Manipur government has been following strict quarantine protocol for all the people arriving in the state with everyone undergoing RT-PCR test mandatorily.
However, due to heavy inflow of people, there is substantial delay in testing all these people and there is a huge backlog of over 15,000 samples pending results, he added.
The state government has decided to stop all the passenger flight services for a period of 10 days in order to clear the pending backlog of testing and also clear the congestion in the quarantine centres, he said.
Face Mask
Spokesperson Health department Khoirom Sasheekumar Mangang said that a quick survey done by the media team of Health department has found that 39.5 per cent of the pedestrians do not wear face mask.
Three per cent of these people gave economic reasons and 26.7 per cent cited medical reasons while the remaining 70 per cent could not give any valid reason for not wearing face mask.
