Bucking the trend of over a week or more, when Kerala had more people on the COVID 19 recovery list than on the positive list, the State reported 19 new cases on Tuesday.
The number of patients who were declared to have recovered from their disease was 16.
Kannur accounted for 10 of the new cases, Palakkad reported four, Kasaragod three, while Kollam and Malappuram accounted for one case each.
Of the 19 new cases, 13 were people who had returned home from abroad, three persons (one each from Malappuram, Palakkad and Kollam) had come from the neighbouring Tamil Nadu, one person had returned from Uttar Pradesh while two were contacts who developed the disease from imported cases.
Tighter measures
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, briefing media, said the fact that the cases were imported across the border meant that stricter control measures were needed on the inter-State borders.
Kerala has reported 426 COVID 19 cases so far, of which only 117 were currently undergoing treatment in hospitals.
The people under the surveillance umbrella in the State has further dwindled to 36,676, of whom, 332 are in isolation wards in hospitals. Among the districts, Kannur now has the maximum number of COVID 19 patients undergoing treatment, at 104.
Testing is being intensified in the district and all those who had arrived in the district from abroad since March 12 and their high-risk contacts would be tested for COVID-19.
Mr. Vijayan said that the virus behaviour and disease patterns were turning out to be unpredictable, which called for the State to be all the more vigilant and cautious.
He said that a 62-year-old patient who is a part of the first patient cluster in Pathanamthitta and who had tested positive on March 13 continued to remain positive for the past 36 days at the Kozhencherry district hospital. Though she had no health issues and was stable, she could not be discharged as even the 22nd sample had showed her to be positive
Public health experts said that the RT-PCR was remaining positive as the test was picking up RNA viral fragments but that the period of virus shedding would be over and that the patient was not considered infectious. However, only a virus culture or subgenomic mRNA sequencing can conclusively say whether the patient is infective.
Mr. Vijayan said that one could not sit back easy and that as far as COVID-19 situation was concerned, the State would have to pay a huge price for any complacency.