Shillong, June 16 – The Meghalaya Medical Expert Committee on Tuesday declared one COVID-19 positive patient as “false positive”, the first ever case to have been detected in the fight of the state against the virulent virus.

Director Health Services Dr Aman War said the 73-year-old man from Ri-Bhoi district, who was earlier diagnosed as being COVID-19 positive, had actually not been infected with Novel Coronavirus, subsequent tests have confirmed, thus cutting down the total positive cases in the state by one.

With this development, Meghalaya now recorded a total of 43 COVID-19 positive cases not 44 cases as it were earlier.

As of date, there are 14 active positive cases, one died and 28 who have recovered.

“Tests have been conducted twice after this person was declared positive and the results came out negative both RT-PCR and antibodies tests. Moreover, after doing the contact tracing of those who came into contact with this person and collected their samples for tests, all of them both high risk and low risk contacts were tested negative. We therefore came to a conclusion that this particular case is a false COVID-19 positive case,” War told journalists after a meeting of the State Medical Expert Committee on COVID-19 on Tuesday night.

War further informed that the last test result of the person came out negative on Tuesday and it was found that he was having lower respiratory tract infection.

He said that the son-in-law of the person was also tested negative.

War informed that after the contact tracing was done, the person has a total of 62 high risk contacts mostly from Ri Bhoi district including three from East Khasi Hills, and 79 low risk contacts all from Ri Bhoi district.

The health official informed that earlier declaration of Umsamlem area as a “containment zone” would be also withdrawn.

Till Tuesday, out of 14,188 samples sent for tests, 13,649 tests found negative and the results for 498 tests are awaited.