Adding to the COVID-19 positive count and existing clusters such as the town’s vegetable market, the latest diagnosis of fresh cases in Yepur village, about 20 km from the district headquarters, throws suspicion on a new link: a self-help group workshop in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.
According to available information, the district administration on April 15 found a child in Yepur to be COVID-19 positive, but his shopkeeper father who had voluntarily approached officials for tests — since he was a frequenter to the town’s vegetable market — and his mother turned negative.
However, aggressive contact tracing of the child immediately led to institutional quarantine of 40 more persons, all of them from the four adjoining houses, among others, on April 17. Of the district’s 26 positive cases that were declared on Tuesday, 13 are located to Yepur.
Sources confirmed to The Hindu that “no one in the village had an abroad-returnee, Markaz-returnee or an outsider till now”. The town’s vegetable market link was also proved wrong with the present results, and hence, the attention now is on a 25-year-old woman who had a travel history to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, for a training involving self-help groups (SHG) in mid-March.
“The woman returned to Tirumalayapalem mandal in Khammam, her maternal home, from Lucknow in the fourth week of March and was immediately stamped with ‘home quarantine’. She returned to Yepur in the first week of April,” an official said. She and her child are among the 13 positive tested in the village.
Officials in Suryapet said there were, “no such SHG groups/members that were sent on training to a Hindi State (Uttar Pradesh or Delhi),” but the possibility that members from Khammam travelled north is for investigation.
Sources in Khammam confirmed that a few residents, including the maternal family the woman from Yepur, in Tirumalayapalem mandal were taken to an institutional quarantine centre on Tuesday.
Senior officials who were alerted by the new suspicion launched a full inquiry into the matter, and likelihood of the woman being infected while in her journey or at any other place, and not necessarily in Lucknow, are also being investigated.