Even as local transmission of COVID-19 cases across the State has been showing a rising trend, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said here on Monday that it was only in less than 1% of the total COVID-19 cases in the State that authorities were unable to establish an epidemiological link.
He said that in many cases where initially the source of infection could not be established, the Health Department, through contact tracing exercise, had managed to find the possible epidemiological links.
In less than 2% cases, the authorities were unable to trace a source of infection in the beginning. In India, the proportion of cases with no known source of infection was 40%, he said.
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Till July 5, of the 5,429 COVID-19 cases in the State, 674 cases had occurred through local transmission while the remaining 4,755 were all imported cases of infection.
Kannur (109) has reported the maximum number of local transmission cases, followed by Kasaragod (93), Thrissur (72), Malappuram (69), and Thiruvananthapuram (72).
Till June 30, of the 4,442 cases reported, in 166 cases the epidemiological link could not be established initially.
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In 125 of these cases, source of infection could be traced and it is only in 41 cases that a plausible link to a source could not be found, Mr. Vijayan said.
Of these 41 cases with no epidemiological link, 23 were currently under investigation and in the case of 18, the authorities were very much in the dark about how those persons had contracted the diseases.
Mr. Vijayan said the Health, Police, and Local Self-Government Departments were hard at work doing the contact-tracing exercise but the public needed to cooperate better with the authorities for the investigations to be fruitful. The government’s approach to the problem of local transmission was multipronged.
0.4 % cases positive
He said the triple lockdown declared at Ponnani a week ago, following the reporting of intense local transmission, was being lifted at midnight. The Health Secretary had informed that following mass testing in the community at Ponnani, only 0.4 % cases had tested positive for COVID-19, he added.
However, the vigil will continue and then restrictions required in a containment zone will continue to be strictly implemented.