Kerala has thrown itself into testing more for COVID-19 in the community.
With many districts earlier declared as those with no cases (Green zone) throwing up huge surprises, and many cases with no history of foreign travel surfacing, the State is deploying PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing more to detect active cases.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday said apart from the routine sampling being done amongst the quarantined population, 875 samples were randomly collected from health-care workers, police, migrants, and people who interacted more with the community in the past five days. Of the latter samples, 611 tested negative. The Chief Minister, however, did not specify how many samples from this lot turned positive.
As part of an intense drive, the Health Department also collected 3,056 samples from select groups in the population on Sunday as a single-day “augmented sampling” to be tested by RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) in designated labs.
Kottayam and Idukki again accounted for 10 of the new 13 COVID-19 cases reported in the State on Monday. Kottayam had six cases, Idukki four, while Palakkad, Malappuram, and Kannur reported a case each.
Mr. Vijayan said five of the new cases had links to Tamil Nadu while one person had come from the United States. Seven cases were considered to be “contacts”, having contracted the disease from other known or unknown COVID-19 cases. One of these contacts in Kottayam was a health worker.
The State also had 13 people on its recovery list. Of the 481 cases reported so far, 355 had recovered, while 123 were undergoing treatment. Of the 20,301 people under surveillance, 489 were in isolation in hospitals and the rest in home quarantine.
The State had so far tested samples of 23,271 people, of which 22,537 returned a negative result.
The Chief Minister said all district medical officers and collectors had been asked to increase COVID-19 testing.
Universal use of masks
Mr. Vijayan said that public compliance of the directive for universal wearing of masks in public places had gone up but it was quite alarming that used masks were being disposed of carelessly by people. This could become a serious threat to health and would be a crime against society.
