Coronavirus cases spiral in Kerala

TRIVANDRUM: Coronavirus infections continued to rise in Kerala, which has been boasting of “flattening the curve,” with 53 more people testing positive on Sunday.

The southern state had recorded a single-day peak of 62 infections on Saturday sounding the alarm bell.

A 53-year-old woman who arrived from the UAE on Wednesday also died on Sunday, taking the total COVID-19 deaths in the state to six.

“We are going through the most critical phase as people are coming from places of deeper virus concentration,” the state’s health minister, KK Shailaja, said.

“Now people coming from the states like Delhi,

Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat have greater chances of getting infected.”

More than four million people from Kerala have migrated to these states or abroad, mostly in the Gulf, in search of jobs and quality education.

Hundreds of thousands of them live in big Indian cities like Bombay, Delhi Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad with high population density.

They were stranded in there or abroad after India entered a lockdown imposed two months back suspending trains and flights, both international and domestic.

The active cases were steadily increasing since May 8, from 16 to 322, and there was a sharp decline in recoveries. Of them, 157 were reported this week.

Of the new cases, 18 came from abroad (the UAE 11, Saudi Arabia three and Kuwait, one).

Others are internal migrants (Maharashtra 19, Gujarat 5, Tamil Nadu 3 and Madhya Pradesh and Delhi one each). A female health worker and four others got infected from their contacts.

Trivandrum and Kannur top the list with 12 cases each followed by Malappuram and Kasaragod (five each), Alappuzha Paladdad and Ernakulam (four each), Kollam (three), Pathanamthitta (2) and Kozhikode (1). Five have recovered on the day.

With this, the number of positive cases since January 30 has gone up to 848, of which 322 are under treatment, 520 have recovered, and six died.

Since the start of special flights and trains two weeks ago, 7,847 expatriates have arrived by air, 1,621 by sea, 4,028 by rail and 79,908 by road.

Now 95,394 people are under observation, 79,188 of them at home and 13,987 under institutional quarantine while 229 others are in hospitals.

On Saturday alone, 1,88 more people were hospitalised.

Many public health experts were warning against the state’s resistance to the evacuation of people stranded away, waiting for the virus to spread.

The first positive cases came from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus, in the last week of January.