Nearly 13 months after recording its first COVID-19 case, Karnataka breached the one million mark and hit 10,01,238, as 4,234 persons tested positive on Thursday. Over 43% of this total caseload is from Bengaluru Urban alone.
Over 10% of the total caseload has been reported in the last three months. The State had reported 9,00,214 cases till December 12 and has since then added 1,01,024 cases to its tally. This brings Karnataka to the third position in the country, after Maharashtra and Kerala.
With 30,865 active cases as on Thursday, Karnataka is in the second position among States after Maharashtra on this count. Fuelled by a spike in cases in Bengaluru, the situation in Karnataka took a turn for the worse from the beginning of July by breaching the 2,000 mark daily initially. It subsequently jumped to over 5,000 per day, and later to over 10,000 cases a day in September.
With 18 deaths on Thursday, the toll touched 12,585. This is apart from 19 non-COVID deaths. Over 96% of COVID-19 fatalities in the State have been reported till December end. The State’s daily Case Fatality Rate (CFR) now stands at 0.42%.
Steady rise since June
From 101 cases in March, 2020, the State witnessed a four-fold rise in April and subsequently a six-fold increase in May. From May to June, there was a five-fold rise and then an eight-fold increase from June to July when the number of cases crossed one lakh and touched 1,08,873. Since then, the numbers more than doubled every fortnight and touched 8,02,817 till October 25.
After that, there was a decline in new cases, and by December the State started recording less than 1,000 cases. Following that the daily cases reduced to less than 500 cases by February end. However, the number of cases again started rising from March first week the State has been reporting more than 4,000 cases for the last two days.
Weak contact tracing
V. Ravi, nodal officer for genomic confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 in Karnataka and member of the State’s Technical Advisory Committee said the State has failed in properly communicating to people about the seriousness of the second wave. “This coupled with weak contact tracing is hitting us hard at the onset of the second wave,” he said.
“During the corresponding period last year, we were tracing 47 contacts for every positive case detected. Now, it is as low as 1:10. We need to trace at least 20-30 contacts for every positive case,” he said.
He said it is important that the State now initiates district-specific data driven interventions. “Testing targets and management strategies based on prevalence in various districts should be taken up on a war-footing otherwise by this month-end we will be going the Maharashtra way reporting 25,000-30,000 cases a day,” he said.
Complacency, false belief
C.N. Manjunath, nodal officer for labs and testing in the State’s COVID-19 task force, attributed the rising cases to extreme complacency by people, false sense of belief that the curve has flattened since November onwards, mutations in the virus and waning immunity among those who had been infected earlier.
“The false sense of belief that the curve has flattened led to a release phenomena resulting in relentless crowding, gathering and violation of COVID-19 norms,” he said adding that slowing down the rate of transmission is entirely in people’s hands.
