Dharamshala: Addressing the weekly Taskforce Briefing, Joint Secretary Tenzin Kunsang presented the appointment of 22 nurses on a contractual basis in addition to the CTA’s Health Department’s existing nurses in 16 different settlements to cope with the Covid pandemic. However, the task force committee acknowledged the requisite of three more nurses for settlements, namely Puruwala, Shimla and Clementown, for which the task force committee urged anyone interested to contact the Department of Health or respective settlement offices.
She further added the return of masks from two Tibetan winter markets that were initially given out under the committee’s project of mask distribution to Tibetan winter sweater sellers across India.
Despite the diminishing number of covid cases in a community, Joint Secretary informed Tibetans to test and quarantine appropriately while entering their settlements to reduce the risk of infecting lower immunity age groups who remained in settlements at the moment. She also requested both the patient and clinic staff to be considerate to relieve the stress of each other.
Following the Joint Secretary, sMenpa Tsering Tsamchoe updated the Covid data of the last seven days, reporting 377 new cases consisting of 186 males and 191 females. The eldest of them is 103 years, while the youngest is two years old, and a single death has been recorded in the same period.
The weekly quarantine status of Tibetan communities in India and Nepal is 628, of which 497 are at home quarantine while 131 are in institutional quarantine as per the data received by the committee. The number of tests conducted in the past seven days is 999, and 20 patients have reportedly received mental health services.
Illustrating the vaccination records of the Tibetan community, sMenpa Tsamchoe mentioned 49,809 completely jabbed Tibetans in India with 493 partially vaccinated. Also, 37 children between 15-17 years are fully inoculated, and 1,206 are yet to receive the second dose in India. 2,879 Tibetans above 60 and 589 frontliners have received booster shots under the facilitation of the Indian government.
As for the status in Nepal, 6,990 Tibetans are entirely vaccinated, and 77 elders above 60 are vexed with the booster. The number of inoculated children of the 15-17 years age group in Nepal is 87.
Up until now, 8,754 Tibetans have been infected by Covid 19, from which 8,235 have recovered, and 164 have died. The active case record of the Tibetan community at present is 355. Before concluding, sMenpa Tsamcho advised everyone to follow the Covid mandatories properly to prevent emergence of new variants.
Although the number of Covid cases across the globe gets reduced, Dr Tenzin Namdol at 97th task-force briefing urged public to continue practising protocols of the pandemic since the numbers are still high enough to escalate. Apart from this, she added the significance of isolation after indication of symptoms to prevent further infection within one’s family, especially before and during the losar.
Source: Tibet.net