KSRTC driver and mobile shop owner test positive

Thiruvananthapuram: Hinting at possibilities of contracting infection from silent carriers within the community, a 28-year-old mobile shop owner and a 40-year-old KSRTC driver at Pappanamcode bus depot were tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday.
A 30-year-old woman and her two-year-old baby, who are from Varkala, were also tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday. They came from Chennai on June 14.
The KSRTC driver came from Thrissur on June 3 and he was on duty for five days. He stayed in the staff room along with five other employees in the remaining days. He was deputed in the bus service that ferried incoming passengers from railway station to institutional quarantine centres and had ferried persons to Tamil Nadu border as well. A few staff at the depot have been asked to go into quarantine.
The epidemiological investigation team faces a stiff task ahead as there are reports of him running line service to certain routes as well.
The only option to trace the passengers who would have travelled in those routes would be to seek information from such persons based on the time and route in which the bus would have operated.
With no probability of anyone remembering the bus number, that is the only way to trace the passengers, the officials said. He developed symptoms of fever on June 14 and he was taken to hospital for swab testing.
The mobile shop owner, who hails from Malappuram, ran a mobile shop at Manacaud along with his partner. Both of them stayed in an apartment at Pettah. When the youth developed throat ache, cough, headache and fever, he went to Fort Taluk Hospital.
He was subjected to preliminary screening there and he was referred to General Hospital where samples were collected. He has now been admitted to General Hospital. His partner is also under observation at General Hospital.
The surveillance team has learnt that both of them have not travelled to Malappuram in recent times. The source of infection could be the customers at the mobile shop. It needs to be checked whether they had compromised on use of gloves, masks and sanitisers while interacting with customers and handling gadgets, health officials said.
In both the cases, contact tracing is going to be a humungous task as the mobile shop owner has reportedly told the officials that every day 50-70 customers would have frequented the shops for various needs and it would be impractical to track all of them over a span of 14 days.
Isolation procedures are being initiated in nearby hotels where he went, the juice shops he visited, the apartment he stayed and the taluk hospital where he was presented with symptoms.