TUMAKURU: With two new COVID19 cases and with reports of those who took part in the funeral of a 73-year-old COVID-19 victim (Patient Number 535) held without any precautions being awaited, Tumakuru is understandably worried. The district now faces the threat of slipping into the red zone - from the orange zone it currently is in.
On Saturday, the neighbors of the 73-year-old victim and his wife, herself a patient, tested positive.
The duo - a forty-year-old man and his 29-year-old wife - are now in isolation at a designated hospital. They were asymptomatic when they tested positive for COVID-19 and are now under treatment.
Their children, aged eight and six, have also been isolated.
It was on March 27 that a sixty-three-year-old from Sira, who had attended a Tablighi Jamat in Nizamuddin in New Delhi had died at a hospital here. The man's 13-year-old son, who had also contracted the virus, recovered at the Indira Gandhi hospital in Bengaluru.
After the district was free from active cases for almost a month, a fresh case surfaced when a cleric from Surat in Gujarat residing at a mosque here tested positive on April 24.
It was during the random collection of the samples of people from outside the state staying here that the case was discovered. But it was the death of Patient 535 on April 26 that triggered panic as not only his wife but also two of the neighbours contracted the virus as we reported earlier.
Meanwhile, due to a communication gap, as district in-charge minister J C Madhuswami himself admitted on Friday, the body of the deceased person (Patient 535) was handed over to relatives even before the test results arrived. So, his being COVID positive was discovered only three days after his 'normal' burial held without following the protocol.
The district health officer Dr Chandrika informed that the collection of samples of the primary contacts of the deceased and the other positive cases, as also of persons with a history of chronic diseases including asthma has begun in the two containment zones - the Poor House Colony and the KHB colony.
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