Virus tracing leads to diverse tracks, and surprise origins in Kerala
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Thiruvananthapuram: The corona virus has been found to infect a wide spectrum of victims, ranging from a youth having approached the hospital repeatedly out of disease phobia to a nurse having given injection without wearing gloves.
An investigation by an expert team of the health department formed to detect the causes of Covid cases without identified origins, points to the presence of unexpected routes of virus spread.
The study was conducted based on 1005 Covid cases reported in July and untraced at the time of infection confirmation. The health department says that 561 of these were traced and 46 could not be found out. The search for 422 cases is still ongoing.
While the youth who had gone to hospitals out of fear of Covid and caught the infection, is from the capital district, the nurse who contracted the disease without taking adequate precautions like wearing gloves was in a private hospital in Kollam district. Of the 561 detected cases, 224 belonged to Covid cluster zones.
The inference of the expert team is that 165 cases could be attributed to contacts with those who had tested positive; 36 were from hospitals and 33 from market areas. 29 health workers got infection from the hospital premises, though not through direct contact with Covid patients. The number of patients who received virus transmission from asymptomatic cases was 27. A mobile shop owner got infected through a virus carrier who had no symptoms and visited the shop for repairing his phone.
It was observed by health workers overall in the state that the co-operation of private shop-keepers and service outlets in keeping record of customers with their contact numbers, has greatly helped the tracing process.
Thiruvananthapuram leads the table not only in the number of transmission from unknown sources, but also in contact tracing. Out of 218 cases, 171 have been traced to their source. Malappuram has the lowest count in this, where only 15 could be traced out of a total of 190 cases.