Community transmission at over 50% in Covid-19 clusters, says Kerala health minister

On Friday, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan had confirmed that community transmission of Covid-19 was detected in two coastal hamlets of Thiruvananthapuram,

Kerala health minister KK Shailaja said Saturday that the rate of community transmission in Covid-19 clusters in the state is more than 50%.

Kerala Health Minister KK Shailaja said teh government woudl focus in the coastal areas to break the chain of transmission of Covid-19 in the state. (ANI)

“Today, there are 84 clusters in Kerala. Inside the clusters, local transmission is more than 50%, but outside the clusters it is below 10%. We should prevent cluster forming and community spread of infection,” Shailaja said, according to ANI.

On Friday, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan had confirmed that community transmission of Covid-19 was detected in two coastal hamlets of Thiruvananthapuram,

Shailaja said the government was turning its focus on coastal areas to break the chain of transmission of the disease.

“We are trying to break the chain of transmission from one cluster to another. We are thoroughly locking the clusters. We need to give more attention to coastal areas,” she said.

Kerala had seemed to get a hold on the spread Covid-19 and brought down the number of active cases to below 100 in the first week of May before fresh cases began to rise as expatriates and people working in other states began returning home.

In the last couple of weeks, new cases of Covid-19 have risen exponentially taking the state’s tally to over 11,000 and the number of active cases to more than 6,000.

On Friday, Kerala reported the highest single-day spike so far with 791 new cases of Covid-19. The pandemic has claimed 40 lives so far in Kerala.