Three more persons, including a 55-year-old woman, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Kottayam, taking the number of patients in the district to six.
The latest to turn positive included a 50-year-old inter-State truck driver from Manarcad, a 55-year-old woman in Samkranthi who returned from Sharjah, and the 60-year-old mother of the infected male nurse in Panachikkad. The driver, who reached home on March 25 after completing his trip to Maharashtra, had completed the quarantine period of 28 days. Meanwhile, the Samkranthi native had been staying in Sharjah with her husband and came back about one-and-a-half months ago.
The woman, who had earlier spent 14 days in home quarantine, reportedly visited various places, including a private hospital in Thellakom and a relative’s house in Kidangoor later. Taking this into consideration, the authorities have started steps to collect details of the persons in contact with the affected persons. Meanwhile, authorities here have put over 500 persons in home quarantine based on the contact list of the headload worker and the health worker who had tested positive for the infection.
While 111 persons had come into primary contact with the headload worker, the male nurse had made direct contact with 21 persons. Apart from these 132 persons, 232 secondary contacts of the affected persons were also put in home isolation.
Workers shifted
The authorities have shifted 25 headload workers, who made direct contact with the virus-infected headload worker, to a corona care centre in Kottayam in the absence of space for isolation at their respective houses. While 14 of them tested negative for the disease, 11 swab samples were rejected earlier. The samples of these persons have been collected again.
As with the patient from Panchikkad, six primary contacts of the male nurse, including his sister, father, and others, were tested negative. More areas of the district, including Manarcad panchayat, have been declared as containment zones.
