India Patient Zero gets Covid again, had not got vaccinated

A 21-year-old from Kerala’s Thrissur district, who was India’s first recorded case of Covid-19, has again tested positive for the virus.

Sources in the health department said the woman, a medical student at Wuhan University of China, has not got either of her vaccination shots.

They said her Covid status was detected after she got her RT-PCR test done on July 8, ahead of a scheduled visit to Delhi. Her test result came on July 9 and she has been in home isolation since then, the sources said, adding that condition is stable. The 21-year-old has no recent travel history.

Sources in her family said she is asymptomatic unlike last year, when she had minor symptoms. They said that over the last year and a half, none of her other family members has tested positive for the virus. None of them has been vaccinated either. They said the 21-year-old — like other Indian students enrolled in Chinese universities and stuck here — was waiting to see which of the vaccines would be approved by China for entry into the country.

It was on January 30 last year that the government confirmed the woman as being the first case of Covid-19 in the country. She was among a group of medical students who had left the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, in the last week of January.

She had then been put in isolation at the Government Medical College, Thrissur, for 25 days. Later, she stayed in home quarantine for another month. Since then, the woman has been attending her virtual classes.

Meanwhile, Edamalakkudy, an all-tribal panchayat in Idukki district, reported its first two Covid-19 cases — of a 40-year-old woman and a 24-year-old youth. A remote village, Edamalakkduy had been the only village in Kerala without Covid-19 cases even as the state’s total Covid-19 count grew to 30 lakh. The government had restricted entry of outsiders to the village in a bid to insulate the ethnic group from the outbreak.