The slow and steady change in the pattern in COVID-related mortality in the State during the past one month was more pronounced on Thursday when three deaths were reported in a day in the State, taking the death toll to 14.
The State also reported 94 new cases on Thursday, of which 84 were imported cases of infection detected in persons who had either travelled into the State from abroad or from other States.
Seven cases are believed to have contracted the infection through contact with known or unknown sources of infection.
Fatalities
Among the three deaths reported on Thursday, the case from Kollam, wherein COVID-19 was confirmed in a 65-year-old patient who had been brought dead to the hospital, has set the alarm bells ringing.
Test to diagnose the disease had been conducted as per the advice of the Medical Board.
The other deaths reported were that of a 73-year-old woman in Palakkad who had returned from Chennai and that of a 27-year-old Malappuram native who had retuned to the State from Abu Dhabi recently. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan confirmed that the youth was also on treatment for blood cancer.
39 recover
On Thursday, 39 people were reported to have recovered from the disease.
The total number of active cases in the State now is 884. Of the cumulative 1,588 cases reported so far, there have been 690 recoveries.
Kerala’s COVID-19 case burden, mortality rate and disease transmission pattern underwent a drastic but expected change after May 4 when the post-lockdown return of Keralites from abroad and other parts of the country where the virus transmission was intense totally altered the disease epidemiology .
The State has put a total of 1.7 lakhs plus people under surveillance, of whom except for the 1,487 isolated in hospitals, the rest are on home or institutional quarantine.
Kerala has tested 99,962 samples in all so far, including routine and surveillance samples.
Nine new regions in Kannur, Kollam, and Palakkad have been designated as hotspots, taking the total number of hotspots in the State to 124.