Special Congress Party Press Briefing by @bhupeshbaghel, Chief Minister, Chhattisgarh:

• At the moment, India along with the whole world is going through an outbreak of Corona. We are all preparing to deal with it.
• As soon as @RahulGandhi ji expressed concern about this subject, we started preparing in Chhattisgarh. On 13th March, we first closed educational institutions, malls, talkies and ministries.
• The first test was conducted on 15th March and we got the first positive case on 18th March. On the same day, we imposed Section 144 in the entire state and on March 21, we locked down the entire state.
• We found 3 more cases and from their case history we came to know that these were people returning from the UK. The number of people who returned from abroad was about 2100. We put all of them in quarantine immediately.
• We also tested people without symptoms and they too tested positive. And we realised that there are people without symptoms who can be positive. We also quarantined their families.

At present, about 76,000 people are in home quarantine in Chhattisgarh and we’re properly monitoring them. We completely sealed the state borders and then closed the boundaries of the districts.

• This awareness also reached the villages and people closed the boundaries of their villages themselves. People living outside the village were kept in quarantine when they returned to the village. Overall we got good success in rural areas also.
• We are constantly making arrangements for food and lodging of about 10,000 labourers from other states.
• People from lower-middle income groups are also helping in this. For this we started ‘Donation on Wheels’. We started with 6 trains in Raipur and around 2500 people donated 17000 packets in two days.
• Another patient was found yesterday. Out of 11 patients, 9 have gone home healthy. The area from which the 11th patient was found has been completely locked down.
• As suggested by @RahulGandhi ji, we will soon begin taking ‘random samples