After two-day slump\, State reports 1\,000 plus cases

Keral

After two-day slump, State reports 1,000 plus cases

Police officers persuading a man to return when he tried to move out of the COVID-19 containment zone at Poonthura in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday.   | Photo Credit: S MAHINSHA

1,167 test positive for SARS-CoV-2 with 949 contracting infection through local transmission

Kerala slipped back to the 1,000-odd cases a day pattern after a short gap of two days, to register 1,167 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday.

Over 81% of the new cases – 949 cases – are locally acquired infections, an indication that local transmission has intensified across the State with a few districts affected more significantly than the others.

Source of infection could not be ascertained in 55 cases.

 

The cumulative case burden of the States crossed the 20,000 mark to reach 20,894 cases, of which the current number of patients undergoing treatment in hospitals is 10,093. So far, the State has reported 10,724 recoveries, with 679 recoveries being reported on Tuesday alone.

Four deaths

Four deaths were added to the official toll figure on Tuesday, one each from Ernakulam, Kasaragod, Alappuzha, and Thiruvananthapuram, taking the State’s COVID-19 toll to 67.

So far, over 500 health-care workers in the Sate have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, sending the crucial workforce in many institutions in quarantine. On Tuesday, 33 of them were affected. With the disease spreading from the non-COVID pool in almost all hospitals, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has asked all hospitals to take additional precautions in the non-COVID section. When community transmission becomes intense, any patient or person coming to a hospital should be treated as a potential carrier of infection.

Expert team

Mr. Vijayan said that an expert team would study all existing safety and infection control protocols in hospitals and assess any gaps in the current system.

Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Malappuram, and Thrissur recorded over a hundred cases on Tuesday.

Mr. Vijayan said the disease transmission in the capital district was progressing in a major way with one in every 18 tests turning out to be positive. This was lower than the State’s average wherein one in every 36 tests turned out to be positive.

Of the 222 cases reported in Thiruvananthapuram, 212 were locally acquired infections. The district currently had 2,936 patients in hospitals, about 29 % of the total active cases in the State.

The State tested 19,140 samples in the last 24 hours. The State has quarantined over 1.5 lakh persons, of whom, 9,818 persons with mild symptoms were isolated in hospitals.

The number of hot spots in the State now is 486.

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