The daily surge in COVID-19 cases in Mysuru district is fuelled by outbreak in the city and urban areas while the rural hinterland has relatively lower number of cases.
There are as many as 343 villages in Mysuru district that have been free of COVID-19 so far, providing the proverbial silver lining to the pandemic cloud.
The daily case load being reported in Mysuru hovers around 2,500 and the positivity rate hovers around 40 per cent which is among the highest in the State. But a majority of these cases are from Mysuru urban and Mysuru taluk which is semi-urbanised and fast turning into an extension of the city due to the relentless horizontal sprawl.
As against 2,500 plus cases being reported from Mysuru district, almost 1,800 to 2,000 cases are from the city and Mysuru taluk while the rural hinterland from the taluks are relatively free with low case loads.
This is also evident in the new cases reported on Wednesday. In all, 2,792 new cases were added during the 24-hour period ending at 8 p.m. on May 26 in Mysuru district. Of these, 1,752 were from Mysuru city and 389 were from Mysuru taluk.
There are 1,560 villages in Mysuru district of which 343 are free of COVID-19 and as many as 119 villages are from H.D.Kote taluk alone. This is followed by Hunsur taluk where there are 64 such villages while there are 44 such villages in Nanjangud taluk. K.R.Nagar has 22 villages without a single case of COVID-19 while there are 35 villages in Sargur, 7 in T.Narsipur, 17 in Mysuru and 35 in Periyapatna.
So the undivided H.D. Kote (Sargur was hived out of H.D. Kote as a separate taluk) accounts for 154 COVID-19 free villages out of 343 such villages in Mysuru, which is almost 45 per cent of such villages in the district.
G.S. Kumar, CEO, Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement, said low population density in H.D. Kote is one of the reasons for less number of cases in the taluk compared to other centres. Places like Hunsur and Nanjangud are almost akin to Mysuru but H.D. Kote town itself is relatively isolated and population density was low, he said. Also, the taluk is forested and with relatively low level of interaction with other centres, the COVID-19 cases in H.D. Kote were relatively low, Mr. Kumar added.
Another reason for low case loads from rural areas could be high coverage of vaccination in rural areas which was among the highest in the State. The first dose coverage is 70.13 per cent for the entire district. Taluk-wise coverage indicates that the rural coverage is higher compared to Mysuru city. The coverage in K.R.Nagar is 84.52 per cent followed by Periyapatna with 78.02 per cent. The coverage in T.Narsipur is 69.32 per cent, Nanjangud (67.62), Hunsur (70.37), H.D.Kote (70.52) and in Mysuru rural it is 75.75 per cent.
