Even as the source of infection at the pharmaceutical company continues to remain a mystery, the cases linked to the Nanjangud plant continue to soar, causing a lot of anxiety among the people of Mysuru, which had been declared a COVID-19 hotspot.
On Thursday, three new positive cases were reported and all the cases were again linked to Jubilant Generics Limited. The number of cases linked to the company alone (employees and their contacts) had crossed 50.
The morning health bulletin said P-303 and P-311 were workers at the Nanjangud company while P-312 is a contact (wife) of P-77. With three new cases, the total number of active cases stands at 49. So far, the total number of positive cases reported from Mysuru district was 61 with 12 patients discharged till Tuesday.
Nine cases linked to the company had tested positive on Wednesday.
Additional Director General of Police Parashivamurthy’s disclosure on Wednesday here that the samples of the raw materials sourced from China had tested negative at the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, had only deepened the mystery on the source of the contagion since there was suspicion on the shipment.
Already, the first employee to be tested positive – P-52 – had been discharged. The question that has bothered the authorities here is - how did P-52, who worked in the quality assurance section of the pharma, contract the disease when he had claimed that he had not travelled abroad and had no contact history?
Out of 422 primary contacts of the pharma employees traced, only 36 remain to the tested. Also, the samples of 760 secondary contacts out of 1,300 identified so far had been sent to NIMHANS in Bengaluru for testing and about 100 samples of the contacts had been sent to the lab at the MMCRI for analysis.
