Muzaffarpur enters Covid-19 map with 3 cases, Jamui lone green district

PATNA: With Muzaffarpur too entering the state Covid-19 map with three positive cases on Saturday, Bihar’s green zones is expected to shrink further in the revised list of color-coded zones likely to be released by the Centre on Monday. Jamui is now the only one out of the 38 districts with no positive cases so far.
Even though the state government has only allowed red and orange zones, as per the Centre’s list, 13 districts in Bihar were kept in the green zone category.The Union health ministry had on April 30 released the color-coded classification of districts across the country.
As per the letter released by Union health secretary Preeti Sudan, Bihar had five districts in the red, 20 in orange zone and rest 13 in green zone. A district is considered green zone when there are no confirmed cases or no new cases in the last 21 days. Now only Jamui has that distinction.
Last week, state home secretary Aamir Subhani had announced that there will be no green zones in Bihar. Principal secretary (health), Sanjay Kumar, said, “We have already removed green zone category. Also in the new list of Centre, which is expected by Monday, there will be decrease in districts in the green zone.”
In the past 12 days, 12 of the 13 green zone districts reported several cases. West Champaran, reported 11 cases in this time period, while Katihar got 10 cases, Samastipur six, Sitamarhi five, Khagaria four, Sheohar three, Saharsa two and Supaul one case in past 12 days.
As per the Centre’s April 30 list, five districts in red zone are Munger, Rohtas, Patna, Buxar and Gaya. Even in the upcoming new list, these districts will not have any relaxations as all of them, except for Gaya, have reported large number of positive cases in recent days.
Maximum cases in the past 12 days were reported from four of these red zone districts with Rohtas recording 38 cases in this period. Munger had 34 new cases, Buxar 30, Patna 18 and Bhojpur 16 cases in the same period. Madhubani, in orange zone, has reported 24 new cases in the past 12 days, which is fourth highest and may enter into red zone.
As per the first list issued by the Centre on April 14, four Bihar districts were kept in hotspot, or red zone, and they included Siwan, Muner, Begusarai and Gaya.
In the second list, Siwan and Begusarai were put in orange zone. Areas that have high case load and contribute 80% of the cases or their doubling rate is less than four days are considered red zones. On the other hand, districts which fall short of red zone criteria, but have potential to enter it, are considered orange zone. With increase in Covid-19 cases from new areas in the past few days, even containment zones have increased in Bihar. On April 27, there were around 50 containment zones in Bihar and by May 8 this figure had increased thrice and gone up to 153.