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Lucknow, May 21 (IANS): A sudden spurt in the coronavirus positive cases has been reported in Uttar Pradesh even as the state relaxes the lockdown rules.
In Barabanki district, a whopping 95 positive cases were reported on Wednesday night. Of these, 49 were migrant workers, while the remaining 46 were those who had come into contact with six corona positive patients earlier.
The corona tally in the district has touched 122.
Barabanki, which is about 22 kilometres from Lucknow, has seen the maximum influx of migrant workers who have arrived in the state capital on trains and buses in recent days.
The district has a 22 per cent minority population and a sizeable section work in Maharashtra.
"Most of the people from here work in film crews in Mumbai. Some of them are on the technical staff and when one person gets established, others in the family join him," said Mehmood Hasan whose two sons and three nephews work as light men in the film industry.
Adarsh Singh, District Magistrate of Barabanki, said, "All those who have been found positive for corona virus were already in institutional quarantine. Forty-nine of those who tested positive have come from outside the district and are being shifted to the hospital. However, there is no need to panic -- numbers are not important, but what is important is that we have identified the cases. Timely stopping them from spreading the contamination. We now have 122 active cases in the district."
Basti had reported 50 positive cases on Tuesday and all of them were migrant workers. Majority of them were asymptomatic.
District Magistrate Basti, Ashutosh Niranjan, told IANS, "Out of these 50 new cases 14 people belong to Basti and 36 are from other districts of UP. They were already in quarantine and we have shifted them to level-I COVID hospital."
The number of corona positive cases in Rampur has also shot up to 68 and Kanpur tally is 317.
Earlier, nine people had tested positive for the deadly virus in Lakhimpur and all of them were migrant workers.
A senior health official from the King George's Medical University (KGMU) in Lucknow, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the number of corona positive cases could 'rise dramatically' in the coming days.
"Thousands of migrant workers who are walking on foot, have escaped medical screening. They are not quarantining themselves either due to unfounded fears. These people-- if they are corona carriers -- could lead to a boom in the corona cases in the coming two weeks," he said.
The state's tally of corona positive cases, on Wednesday, touched 5265 and the number of deaths stood at 127.