In a recent, three men tested positive for Covid-19 in Calcutta on Sunday, taking the number of patients in Bengal to 21, a state health department official said.
One of them, a 52-year-old anaesthetist with an army hospital, had returned to the city from Delhi on March 17, according to civic officials who have the job of tracing the contacts of all Covid-19 patients in Calcutta.
An army official in Delhi said the anaesthetist, a colonel, may have come in contact with someone who had travelled abroad.
“Those he has treated at the military hospital have also been quarantined,” he said.
Another of the new patients, a 66-year-old resident of Baranagar, had been admitted to a private nursing home in north Calcutta on March 26 with fever and respiratory distress.
An official at the nursing home said he was being shifted to the Infectious Diseases and Beleghata General Hospital on Sunday night.
The patient has no travel history but his 60-year-old brother, who recently got admitted to a private hospital in southeast Calcutta with a stomach ache, had returned from Madhya Pradesh shortly before.
An official of the southeast Calcutta hospital said the patient had been shifted to an isolation ward and a swab would be collected and sent for a coronavirus test on Monday. He currently has no symptoms of Covid-19.
“Now that his elder brother has tested positive, we cannot take any chances,” the hospital official said.
The third patient to test positive for Covid-19 on Sunday is a 59-year-old from Seoraphuli in Hooghly, who had got admitted to a private hospital in Salt Lake on Saturday with fever and cough.
An official at the Salt Lake hospital said the patient had had a fever since March 16 along with “slight respiratory trouble, which increased since March 22”.
“The patient is diabetic and hypertensive. He had travelled to Durgapur before March 16. He is currently in ICCU isolation with respiratory distress,” the official said.
It’s unclear whether the patient had any travel history outside Bengal, health department officials said.
The condition of a critical Covid-19 patient, a 66-year-old Nayabad resident admitted to a private hospital in southeast Calcutta, remained almost similar with only marginal improvements since Saturday.
