Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Saturday that the state could see nearly 90,000 new Covid-19 cases in September if the present trend of a surge in patients continued.

“We recorded 68,000 new cases in August and around 29,000 cases in the first 10 days of this month. At this rate, we would have around 90,000 new Covid-19 cases by the end of September,” he told journalists in Guwahati.

Assam has recorded 1,38,339 Covid-19 positive cases till Friday with 1,08,329 recoveries and 430 deaths. The state has a recovery rate of 78.3% and a fatality rate of 0.31%.

“We have conducted over 27 lakh tests at the rate of nearly 80,000 tests per million. The doubling rate of total Covid-19 patients in the state at present is 30 days,” said Sarma.

Assam has been recording around 2,500 fresh Covid-19 cases daily for the past two weeks with Kamrup Metropolitan district, which includes the state’s biggest city Guwahati, being the worst affected with around 500-600 cases daily.

Amid worries about scarcity of hospital beds due to rise in the number of cases, Sarma said that the government hospitals have enough ICU units and beds to cope with the surge for this month and initiatives are being taken to ensure that there is no dearth of beds in the coming months.

“Due to an increase in requirement of oxygen for serious patients, we are constructing oxygen tanks at four hospitals in the state where we can store the commodity for at least 15 days,” he said.

The minister said that though the death count of those who died due to Covid-19 in the state is 430 at present, there have been many cases where people who were declared negative died a few days later. Sarma informed that there was no data yet on the exact number of such cases.

“Till date we are recording deaths as per ICMR guidelines. If tomorrow, we are told to include recovered patients who died, we will have to include them as well in the list of Covid-19 deaths,” he said.