The number of active COVID-19 cases in the State is slowly moving towards the four-digit figure, with 82 more testing positive on Wednesday.
While 53 of the new cases were detected in people who came from abroad, 19 cases were found in returnees from other parts of the country. Ten persons, including five health-care workers, are believed to have contracted the disease from the community (known/unknown sources of infection). Kerala has a total of 832 active cases now, a figure which spiked from 16, in less than a month’s time. Of the 1,494 cases reported in the State so far, 651 persons have recovered from the disease. On Wednesday, 24 patients recovered from the disease.
Thiruvananthapuram district has 14 new cases, Malappuram 11, Idukki 9, Kottayam 8, Alappuzha and Kozhikode 7 each, Palakkad, Kollam and Ernakulam 5 each, Thrissur 4, Kasaragod 3 and Kannur and Pathanamthitta 2 each.
Of the active cases, Palakkad has the highest number of COVID-19 patients at 148. Kannur has 118 patients, Malappuram has 90 cases and Kasaragod has 86 cases.
The number of persons under surveillance has gone up to 1,60,304, of whom, 1,58,864 are either in home or institutional quarantine, while 1,440 with mild symptoms are isolated in hospitals. The State is currently testing an average of 3,000 samples daily and in the last 24 hours has tested 4,004 samples. The cumulative number of samples tested so far is 73,712, apart from the sentinel surveillance samples, which number 16,711.
Six more regions from Kollam, Wayanad, Ernakulam and Kasaragod have been designated as hotspots and add up to a total of 128 hotspots in the State.
