Kerala recorded 1,083 new daily cases of Covid-19 even as 1,021 patients under treatment recovered on Tuesday, a day that saw the police swing into action in different parts of the State as part of a new disease containment strategy announced by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, with a mandate to rein in the unbridled spread through contact in a week’s time.

The Chief Minister has sought to describe this strategy as being implemented with the active support of health professionals and workers, but clearly failed to buy peace with the latter who feel that the move is neither ethical nor provides a logical approach to dealing with a public health problem, which is far from being a regular law and order issue.

Infections through contact

On Tuesday, out of the 1,021 new cases , as many as 902 were infected through contact, with the source in at least 71 cases unknown. This has been a worrying trend for the most part of July that saw the State government admitting that community transmission has taken place in at least two clusters in the densely populated coastal regions of Thiruvananthapuram.

The death toll is now at 87 and not too far away from the three-figure mark, something way beyond what the State administration had bargained for. In an open critique of his own administration, the Chief Minister had said on Monday that the State is paying now for some inexplicable and unpardonable sloth that had crept into its Covid-19 defence midway.

As on this (Wednesday) morning, the active cases are 11,540; total confirmed cases till date at 27,956; and recovered, 16,299. Confirmed cases per million is 795.9 (national average 1,435); recovery ratio at 58.3 per cent; case fatality ratio at 0.3 per cent; and average growth rate at 4.8 per cent. Tests per million have drastically improved to close to 25,000.

Recoveries trending up now

The Covid-19 dashboard maintained by the State Health Department showed that the graph of recoveries trending up above that of active cases, which appears to be plateauing around the 1,000-mark for the time being. The highest daily maximum of new cases at 1,310 was reported on July 31, eight days after the 1,000-mark was breached first on July 22.

On Tuesday, there were 1,45,062 persons under observation across the State, with 1,34,140 at their homes or institutional quarantine centres and 10,922 in hospitals. Tuesday saw 1,241 people being hospitalised. A total of 8,58,960 samples have been sent for testing till date (way below those by neighbouring Tamil Nadu, which boasts a figure close to a whopping 29 lakh).

Tuesday also saw Nobel laureate Venkatraman ‘Venki’ Ramakrishnan commending Kerala’s efforts in fighting the pandemic. It is a model for others States when it comes to literacy, women's rights and public health, he said during a session of the Kerala Dialogue, a series of conversations that attempts to rethink and re-imagine development of a world disrupted by the pandemic.

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