One hot spot less in Kerala, thanks to this IAS officer
nTHIRUVANANTHPURAM:PATHANAMTHITTA, a hilly district in central Kerala and home to the Sabarimala shrine was among the first sites in the country where coronavirus spread after a family that returned from Italy tested positive for Covid-19 in early March.
However, the district now has only 13 of the 286 positive cases in the state. By comparison, Kasargod has 121. According to CM Pinarayi Vijayan, while Kasargod remains in the hot spot list of the Union health ministry, Pathanamthitta has been removed.
One of the people responsible for this containment is a 2012 batch IAS officer, PB Nooh, the district collector of Pathanamthitta. He raised an alarm after thousands of devotees congregated at Sabarimala to attend the monthly prayers that began March 13. This wasn’t received well by devotees and he faced much abuse on social media.
“When the temple was opened despite the Travancore Devaswom Board’s warning, at least 13,000 pilgrims came in four days. So I sent an SOS to the government to announce the closure of the temple,” Nooh said. On
March 20, the state disallowed entry to the Sabarimala shrine.
Pathanamthitta was the first district in the state to use flow charts to help trace the contacts of infected persons. “It was a cumbersome process. Police, health workers, NGOS and political leaders all helped us. This also raised the awareness level of the people,” 40-year-old Nooh said.
Pathanamthitta was first to introduce a so-called geo-fencing application to locate quarantine violators. This application is now being used across all the districts’ control rooms to monitor the spread of coronavirus. “It is teamwork and many of us have spent sleepless nights. We enforced norms ruthlessly. In such a situation we can’t be soft and now this has started showing some results,” said Nooh.