Kerala’s COVID-19 case graph continued its exponential rise on Monday, logging 22,946 new cases, when 69,373 samples were tested in the past 24 hours. The graph which began rising on January 3, has not shown any signs of slowing down.
Following the second wave, the new cases reported daily in the State had come as far down as 1,824 cases on December 26.
Large-scale social interactions and family gatherings during Christmas and New Year season contributed significantly to the rise in cases during the first week of January.
Four-fold rise
Daily new cases, which rose to over 5,000 on January 7, quickly shot up in the subsequent days and has risen four-fold in a space of just 10 days.
The State’s active case pool, which had just 19,021 cases on January 2 shot up to 1,21,458 cases as on Monday, in a space of just 15 days.
The speed of disease transmission indicates that the virus has the capacity of affect a chunk of the population within a short time before it slows down, the emerging picture similar to that in South Africa or the U.K. where Omicron virus variant triggered a huge wave of COVID cases.
Of the total active cases now, 3.7 % are currently admitted in hospitals or field hospitals.
The Health department’s data says that during January 10 to 16, the average active cases were 67,495 out of which an average of around 0.8 % were admitted in oxygen beds and 0.9% in ICUs. New cases increased by 182% (60,161 cases) , while active cases increased by 160% during this period, in comparison to the previous week. Hospitalisations increased by 41% and ICU occupancy by 21%.
A total of 5,280 persons were reported to have recovered from the disease on Sunday.
Hospitalisations are rising and on Monday, the number of patients in the State newly admitted to hospitals with COVID showed a significant jump to 711. Total hospitalisations have thus risen to 5,057.
Current ICU occupancy of COVID patients in both public and private hospitals in the State has been rising steadily and now stands at 655. The number of patients requiring ventilator support also went up slightly to 178.
The case fatality stands at 50,904, with the State adding 72 deaths to the official toll on Monday.
This includes 18 deaths which occurred in the past few days and 54 deaths which have now been accepted as COVID deaths by the Government as per the new guidelines of the Centre and following the appeals filed by families.
The State’s cumulative COVID-19 burden, ever since the pandemic began, now stands at 54,01,777 cases.
Among the districts, Thiruvananthapuram reported the highest number of new cases with 5,863 cases, followed by Ernakulam 4,100, Kozhikode 2,043, Thrissur 1,861, Kottayam 1,476, Kollam 1,264, Palakkad 1,191, Kannur 1,100, Malappuram 935, Pathanamthitta 872, Alappuzha 835, Idukki 605, Kasaragod 574 and Wayanad 227 cases.
