Kerala residents least exposed to virus

On Wednesday, the Union health ministry released state-wise data from its latest round of seroprevalence survey conducted between the last week of June and first week of July. It showed that at 44.4% detected seropositivity, Kerala had the lowest proportion of population exposed to Sars-cov-2 in India. The national average was 67.6%. This, of course, includes the contribution of vaccination. This tell us two things.

First, at the end of the second wave (when ICMR’S serosurvey was conducted), people in Kerala had been the least exposed to the virus in the country. The corollary of these findings is also that Kerala had the highest proportion of population (55.6%, compared to a national average of 32.4%) of any state in the country that still remained susceptible to the infection.

Second, the findings give us a good idea of how well states worked on their testing. Placing the results of ICMR’S serosurvey along the total number of infections reported till the first week of July (when the survey concluded) shows that Kerala was, by a massive margin, the best state when it comes to identifying its on-the-ground infections.

Till July 7, the state had reported a little over 3 million infections against the roughly 15.6 million people that had been exposed to the virus (if the findings are extrapolated on the state’s population). This paints a picture of the state’s testing strategy – Kerala was able to identify around 19% of all people exposed to the virus in the state.

To put context to these, the national average for this detection rate is around 3%.