Four confirmed coronavirus patients test negative in Chitral

CHITRAL: Four confirmed coronavirus patients test negative in Chitral. While the number of coronavirus patients continued rising for over a week since the emergence of the first case in Chitral on April 19, the sign of recovery of the patients is a good omen.

The four included Shahab Uddin, who was the first COVID-19 positive patient reported in Chitral. The others are: Sher Nawaz, Rehmatullah and Shams Akbar.

Guidelines from WHO on clinical management recommended that a clinically recovered COVID-19 patient should test negative for the virus twice, with tests conducted at least 24 hours apart, before being discharged from the hospital.

The four patients in Chitral will undergo another coronavirus test after a week. Chitral has no facility to test for the virus and samples of suspected patients are sent to the government laboratory in Peshawar.

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in March 2020 in Pakistan, a large number of people of Chitral started returning to their hometowns. Most of them were kept in quarantine centres across Chitral for two weeks.

Initially, five suspected patients tested negative for the virus but on April 19 a man who had returned from outside Chitral tested positive, which was the first case in Chitral, and within about 10 days the number of confirmed patients reached 16.

These positive patients are kept on isolation at the District Headquarters Lower Chitral and the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital Booni in Upper Chitral.