Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala health authorities are baffled at not being able to identify the source of infection of eight people who tested positive for the novel coronavirus last week, Health Minister KK Shailaja said Monday.
“Those who have turned positive at Kottayam and the two nurses in the state capital district… the source is still not ascertained, so is of one case each at Palakkad and Kozhikode. Then there are two cases, both of who passed away at Thiruvananthapuram and a four-month-old child, whose source is also unknown,” she said.
“Even though we have these untraced cases, we can safely say that there has been no community spread or a third wave of the virus in our state.”
“Community spread is the infection of the virus in a community as whole. We have been conducting random testing. We got a nurse infected with the virus in a random testing conducted at hospitals. There is sentinel surveillance, random testing and all this is being done to check the community spread and it has been found that as of now there is no community spread,” she said.
Shailaja, however, said that in the state, even doctors and other medical professionals are turning positive, raising a reason for worry. “There are fears being raised about the efficacy of the security kits used by the medical professionals,” she added.
Giving the example of Singapore, she said everything looked fine from January 23 to March 23 as they had only 500 cases but after the lockdown was lifted they are around 15,000 cases.
There is need to be extremely careful in the coming months else it would result in community spread, she said.
She asserted that testing was being done in a systematic manner– those who have been exposed to the virus and have symptoms were being tested first followed by those who did not show any symptoms, but had come from high risk areas.
Priority is then being given to sentinel surveillance to understand whether there is any presence in the community and people who have no travel history and symptoms are being tested.
Thirteen fresh COVID-19 cases were detected in Kerala Monday taking the total cases to 481. There are 123 active cases, while 355 have been cured. Over 20,000 people are under observation, including over 400 in various hospitals.
