Kerala continues to report high number of cases

TRIVANDRUM: Kerala continues to be India’s coronavirus hotspot reporting the highest number of cases for more than three months now.

The southern state is now home to 70,395 of India’s active caseload of 185,662, which is 1.74 per cent of the total cases, while it’s 8.02 per cent in Kerala.

During the past 24 hours, the state reported 6,753 new infections, which is 39.42 per cent of India’s new cases, with an alarmingly high testpositivity rate of 11.63 per cent.

The difference in new recoveries outnumbering new cases has also improved the recovery rate to 96.82 per cent today.

The gap between recoveries and active cases is steadily increasing in India, and it presently stands at 10,115,176, according to the federal health ministry data. Kerala continues to report the highest daily new cases at 6,753 followed by Maharashtra (2,779) and Tamil Nadu (574).

India also reported 152 new case fatalities. Of them, Maharashtra accounted for 50 followed by Kerala with 19 daily deaths.

India has vaccinated around 1.5 million people so far and on Saturday while 347,058 people benefited from the drive only 47,293 of them were from Kerala.

KK Shailaja, the state’s health minister, said the health department had set a plan to strengthen the vaccination drive in the next phase.

So far, 487,306 frontline health workers have registered for vaccination and the administration of the second dose will begin on Feb.15.

Kerala reported India’s first case on Jan.30 last year when a medical student returned from the Chinese epicentre of Wuhan three days back.

Two months later, a couple of families returned from Italy tested positive for the virus which led to early spread.

Failure of proper testing and isolation of the infected when the migrants started returning in large numbers triggered further spread.

With 14,256 new coronavirus infections reported in the last 24 hours, India on Saturday continued with its low streak of single-day cases, increasing the overall tally to 1,06,39,684, the health officials said.

For the past 16 days, the country has been recording less than 20,000 daily new infections even as the toll remained below 300-mark for just short of a month.

On January 19, India had reported 10,064 new coronavirus infections, the lowest single-day spike in seven months. The country had recorded over 10,000 cases on June 6 last year.