Kerala has declared community transmission of the Covid-19 pandemic in at least two spots of Thiruvananthapuram, with the State as a whole recording another record-breaking daily count 791 new cases on Friday.
Thiruvananthapuram district has been recording the individual highest numbers during the past several days sending alarm bells ringing. At the daily briefing, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, however, told reporters that drumming up a targeted frenzy over community transmission would not serve any purpose.
“What is needed is heightened vigil and a cultivated perception about the person next — friend or family - being a potential carrier, maintaining the social distancing protocol, apart from wearing a face mask. Any of the 81 clusters, including 10 large ones, in the State is susceptible to community transmission,” he said.
The WHO defines community transmission as large outbreaks of local transmission arrived at through an assessment of factors including, but not limited to, large cases not linkable to transmission chains; large numbers of cases from sentinel lab surveillance; and/or multiple unrelated clusters in several areas.
The Chief Minister said that out of the 97 samples tested on Friday at Pulluvila village in coastal Thiruvananthapuram, 51 had proved positive. Similarly, 26 out of the 51 tested at nearby Poonthura Ayush Centre came in as positive, while it was 20 out of 75 at Puthukurichi, all along the coastal belt.
This prompted the administration to take a call — perhaps for the first time in the country - on community transmission as having occurred at Poonthura and Pulluvila. Vijayan said that the coastal belt, which has been divided into three zones for targeted rearguard action, might go into a complete lockdown from Saturday.
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