Itanagar: Arunachal Pradesh reported its fourth COVID-19 case after a 12-year-old student, who recently returned to the state from Delhi in a bus, tested positive for the disease, a senior official said on Sunday.
The boy had returned to the state on May 25 along with a group of students and was placed under institutional quarantine, he said.
“The student, who hails from Upper Siang district, is asymptomatic and was housed in a COVID-19 care centre in Yinkiong, the district headquarters. His test reports arrived on Saturday night from the Regional Medical Research Centre at Dibrugarh in Assam,” state Health Secretary P Parthiban said.
The swab samples of the other people who were on the bus with the boy have been sent for tests and the results are awaited, the health secretary said.
This is the third case reported in the state in a span of a week.
Earlier, on May 17, a 30-year-old Delhi returnee was diagnosed with the disease, almost a month after Arunachal Pradesh was declared coronavirus-free.
A 19-year-old student, who recently returned to the state from Chennai in a Shramik Special train, had tested positive for the disease on May 27.
The first patient in the northeastern state, a 31- year-old man from Lohit district, was discharged from a hospital in Tezu on April 16 following his recovery.
Meanwhile, the state health department said that a batch of 260 samples will be sent to Delhi during the day for tests.
The state Cabinet had on Friday decided to outsource COVID-19 testing to clear the backlogs in the laboratories.
The results of 1,334 samples from the state are awaited so far, of the total 8,016 collected till Saturday.