A 47-year-old official with a district cooperative bank in Sangli city in western Maharashtra has tested positive for COVID-19 and is said to be in a critical condition, said authorities on Sunday.
With this, the number of positive cases in Sangli district, which has not seen a positive case in the past fortnight, has risen to 27.
Twenty six of these cases are either members of a family from the district’s Islampur tehsil who had tested positive last month or their contacts.
The new case, the first to be reported within Sangli-Miraj-Kupwad civic body limits, has caused concern to authorities given that the patient apparently had no travel history.
“We received the bank official’s swab sample reports at 12.45 a.m. today and it returned positive. He was admitted to the Civil Hospital on April 17. All six members of his household have been quarantined and the process of contact tracing is on,” said Sanjay Salunkhe, district civil surgeon, Sangli, speaking to The Hindu.
Dr. Salunkhe said that the patient had a major heart problem and had to be put on ventilator.
“He remains in a critical condition. We are trying to discern how he contracted the virus,” he said, adding that the other 26 cases in the district, who had recovered, were still placed in quarantine to be on the safe side.
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As a precautionary measure, the Sangli police have sealed-off the city’s Vijaynagar area, where the patient and his family lives.
Earlier, four members of the Islampur family had tested positive on March 23, making them the first cases in the district. The four had returned via Mumbai airport on March 13 from Saudi Arabia after completing Haj. Since then, they infected 21 others, most of them their own relatives, to emerge as one of the largest cases of cluster infection. One other girl from Kolhapur who came in contact with this family had also tested positive.
This had compelled the district authorities to completely seal off Islampur for three days, reducing essential services to a bare minimum.
Since then, the repeat samples of all 26 patients have tested negative and no new case had been reported from the district for 15 days until Sunday.
The total number of positive cases across Maharashtra surged to 3,648 on Saturday with the State’s death toll rising to 211. The total patients in Pune division (of which Sangli is a part of) stands at 647 with 54 deaths so far.