The number of active COVID-19 cases or patients currently undergoing treatment in the State went up to 1,761 with 123 new positive cases and 53 recoveries on Thursday. It is for the seventh consecutive day that the State was reporting 100 cases a day.
All except six of the new cases are imported cases of infection reported in people who had come to the State from abroad or from other parts of the country. In the case of six patients, they had contracted the disease through local transmission after they came into contact with known/unknown sources of infection.
The number of persons who tested positive for COVID-19 ever since the outbreak began in the State is 3,726, of whom 1,941 persons have recovered from the disease so far.
The State has kept 1,59,616 persons under surveillance and in quarantine, of whom 2,349 with mild symptoms are isolated in hospitals in various districts. The number of hotspots in the State now is 113.
Testing to be upped
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, briefing media here on Thursday, said that the State intended to increase COVID-19 testing in stages so that by July, 15,000 tests can be conducted in a single day. He said that general safety precautions against COVID-19 would have to be tightened and that there cannot be any compromise on the requirement of quarantine considering the fact that the pandemic is set to peak in the State in the coming months.
He said that only 7 % of the imported cases had resulted in local transmission, which pointed to the efficient manner in which the State was managing the tracing and quarantine part of COVID-19 containment.
He said that the Break the Chain campaign would have to be followed through without any gaps and that people should cooperate with officials in figuring out possible epidemiological linkages of cases so that anyone at potential risk of infection can be identified and quarantined. He said that private labs and private hospitals cannot impose arbitrary and exorbitant charges for COVID testing and that the government would soon bring in a uniformity in testing fee.
The government was also engaging the private sector in the manner in which the latter can cooperate with the government at a later stage in the fight against the pandemic when government facilities will not be enough to manage the patient load.