Kerala’s COVID-19 caseload spiked again on Wednesday when 24 persons tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and all except one being imported cases of infection.
Briefing media, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that while 12 of the new positive cases were persons who had returned from abroad, 11 cases were persons who had come from other parts of the country. One case in Kannur is believed to have contracted the disease through contact with known or unknown sources of infection.
Seven of the new cases are located in Palakkad, four in Malappuram, three in Kannur, two each in Pathanamthitta, Thiruvananthapuram and Thrissur, while one case each was reported from Kasaragod, Kozhikode, Ernakulam and Alappuzha.
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Five persons were declared as having recovered from COVID-19.
Kerala has reported 666 COVID-19 cases so far, of which 161 are active cases. The total number of persons recovered so far is 502. There are 74,398 persons under surveillance, of whom, except for 533 who are isolated in hospitals, the rest are in home or institutional quarantine.
The State tested 48,543 samples so far, of which 46,961 showed negative result. From the sentinel surveillance studies, of the 6,900 samples tested so far, 5,728 turned negative.
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Mr. Vijayan said that given the manner in which the caseload was going up, the State should brace for a serious situation ahead. It was on May 7 that expatriates began arriving in the State. From just 16 cases in hospitals on May 8, in a space of exactly two weeks, the number of patients undergoing treatment had gone up to 161, he said.
Mr. Vijayan said that the Sate had been anticipating this and that the disease containment strategies had been devised with the clear knowledge that the cases would spike. COVID-19 is a pandemic which has spared no nations and there should be no discrimination against the Non-Resident Keralites coming back home.
However, the government would have to be very strict about the control measures, surveillance and quarantine because it was important to keep disease transmission down for the safety of everyone, he said.
New posts
The government, through the National Health Mission, has created an additional 2,948 temporary posts in 21 categories to strengthen containment activities. This is apart from the 3,770 such posts created earlier.
All new recruits would be deployed in first-line COVID care centres, COVID care hospitals and dedicated COVID hospitals.