Rural panchayats witness home-based infection

Thiruvananthapuram: Three panchayats in the district have recorded TPR above 30% in the past one week while 22 panchayats have touched 20% and above in the same period. As many as 10 panchayats in Neyyattinkara have recorded high TPR in the past one week.
Kollayil, Aruvikkara and Amboori panchayats have recorded TPR above 30%. Kollayil has been the worst hit with a weekly TPR of 31.27%. A total of 96 positive cases have been confirmed in this panchayat out of 307 samples.
Aruvikkara and Amboori have been reporting high positivity rates for the past two weeks. At Aruvikkara, 512 samples were collected which yielded 157 positive cases in a week. For the same period Amboori recorded 47 positives out of 155 samples.
Health officials in these panchayats said that they are recording mostly home-based infection. “The pattern has been mostly similar, one member in a family catches infection and soon all members fall ill. There are families where all the seven members tested positive,” a health official said.
Amboori panchayat has been slowly witnessing a resurgence of Covid-19, according to panchayat representatives. Recently family members from three wards in the panchayat went to attend a wedding outside the state and when they returned many family members tested positive. There are even cases where source of infection remains unknown. A 73-year-old woman had died of Covid-19 here but she had hardly stepped out of her house and none of her family members tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. The officials said that the general trend of infection in rural wards is being reflected at Amboori as well and so far there has not been any cluster related infection here.
The officials said that Aruvikkara is one area where many people frequently travel to corporation areas for work and some of them contracted the infection from workplaces and passed it on to family members.
Some of the panchayats with high TPRs are recording a repeat of the pattern of infection which had stricken these rural wards in the first wave. Unbroken contact transmission had resulted in around 45 clusters across the district in August. While the first half of July was consumed by random transmission along the coastal belt, the final half leading up to August saw a similar transmission chain unveiling in rural panchayats. In panchayats like Kallikadu, Perumkadavila, Peringamala and Kattakada, more than half of the total wards had reported cases. One striking feature of all these cases had been simultaneous transmission in family members soon after an index patient was identified.