67-yr-old woman third to die of Covid-19 in Dakshina Kannada

TNN | May 1, 2020, 04:32 IST

Policemen seal Boloor area in Mangaluru on Thursday, after a woman tested positive for Covid-19

Mangaluru: A 67-year-old woman, on ventilator support at Wenlock Hospital passed away due to Covid-19 on Thursday.
She is the third patient in Dakshina Kannada to fall prey to the novel coronavirus that has also claimed the lives of two other women from here. All the three victims were from Kasba village in Bantwal town. While the first victim,P-390, died on April 19, her mother-in-law,P-432, succumbed to the disease on April 23.
An official communique from the district administration said the 67-year-old woman, a contact of P-432, and her neighbour, were shifted to Wenlock Hospital on April 18, after showing symptoms of cold, cough and fever for four days. They were earlier treated at Bantwal taluk hospital. She was being treated for viral pneumonia after exhibiting signs of severe acute respiratory illness (SARI). The patient was diabetic and also had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She tested positive on April 20 and was in the ICU since then.
The district health authorities said her health condition was unstable, and despite receiving the best medical treatment available, the end came at 5.40pm. The district administration has arranged to conduct her final rites at the Hindu crematorium at Boloor in the MCC limits in the presence of her immediate family.
The total active Covid-19 cases in Dakshina Kannada has now dipped to seven. A total of 12 Covid-19 patients have been discharged.
After a little over a 19-hour wait from 5pm on April 29, a strong rumour that the 16th resident of Dakshina Kannada had tested positive was confirmed on Thursday. When the state bulletin was released at 12.25pm, the first entry in it read, “P-536, female, Dakshina Kannada, Contact of P-501, designated hospital, Dakshina Kannada”. She was among the 22 positive cases that the state reported since the evening bulletin of April 29.
The presence of a positive case in Boloor village was almost confirmed when police on Wednesday evening started preparations to seal specific areas of the village from where P-536, a 58-year-old woman, hailed from. However, the district administration was hamstrung in either confirming or denying it, for they received the report of the woman testing positive, only after minister Suresh Kumar had finished his daily media briefing on the state’s situation, in Bengaluru.
Gayathri Nayak, deputy director, DUDC, said that the district authorities have clear instructions not to release information prior to it being announced in either the afternoon or evening state bulletin.
In the interim, health authorities had shifted P-536, a patient treated for brain TB at First Neuro Hospital and discharged on April 20, to Wenlock Hospital. First Neuro Hospital is a supervised Covid-19 isolation centre.
B A Khader Shah, senior assistant director, department of information and public relations, said that the media was after him to get the district administration to release a special bulletin on the Boloor case. Reports of this case had spread like wildfire on social media and police action on ground only fuelled it, he said.
Deputy commissioner Sindhu B Rupesh has appointed executive engineer 3 of MSCL as the incident commander for the containment zone in Boloor, which has a population of 640. Dakshina Kannada has recorded 22 positive cases overall. While 16 are residents of this district, four are from Kasaragod in Kerala and one each from Karkala in Udupi and Bhaktal in Uttara Kannada. Out of this, a husband-wife duo from Uppinangady are likely to be discharged either this weekend or early next week.