The Central team engaged by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to look into the current pandemic situation in Kerala and the steady rise in case graph met senior administrators and the State’s expert committee on COVID-19 here on Monday.
The team is said to have drawn attention to the State’s home care and isolation, which, according to it, needed better supervision and management. The State might need to evolve a new strategy for containment and for checking disease transmission, it has been pointed out
Contact tracing and targetted testing were also focussed upon. The team also raised the possibility of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant in circulation in the State. However, it was pointed out that the State was regularly sequencing virus samples, and all samples tested till date have yielded only the Delta variant.
Delta variant
The expert committee said the current rise in cases should be weighed against the changed disease epidemiology in the State after the entry of the Delta variant. By just looking at the total COVID case numbers, the true pandemic situation in the State cannot be assessed.
The State has to study the disaggregated data – how many of the new cases being reported now are reinfections in people who were earlier infected by the original corona virus strain; the proportion of people who have received one dose/two doses of vaccine amongst the new infections – or else, pockets where new infections are happening in people who are immunologically naive cannot be assessed.
