Lockdown fails to curb fresh cases in Nilgiris

UDHAGAMANDALAM: The lockdown hasn’t much helped the Nilgiris to bring down the daily spike in Covid-19 cases. In fact, the caseload saw a steady rise till June 3, when it had recorded 584 cases, compared to 179 on May 10. While the cases dropped by 70 on June 4, the daily caseload continued to hover around 500 and more in the past three days.
The test positivity rate too has been on the rise.From 11.7% during the seven-day period from May 7 to 13, the positivity rate had shot up to 24.9% during May28-June 3. The highest-ever daily test positivity rate that the hill retreat had registered was 28% on May 30.
The district has also reported 69 Covid-19 deaths in the past one month.
Health officials said they were expecting the daily cases to plateau in the district some 10 days ago, but in vain. They said most of the cases were reported from the settlements of Scheduled Caste (SC) people and rural areas, where the awareness about the pandemic was comparatively low.
In the second and third weeks of May, collector J Innocent Divya said, the district had seen 1,098 Covid-19 index cases and 4,700 primary contact cases. “When the lockdown was announced, people who had gone to Tirupur, Coimbatore and Erode for work returned home. Residents of SC settlements, most of them were carriers of the virus.”
She said the outsiders having houses or guest houses in the Nilgiris had as well moved to the district during the lockdown. According to her, the e-registration system hadn’t helped much to curb the unnecessary travel. “We had conducted a study to find out the cause for the rise in fresh cases after the imposition of the lockdown. And we found that the main transmitters were the local returnees and others who flocked to the hills.”
Also, as essential activities, the horticulture and tea sectors were exempted during the lockdown. “People who returned from other districts started working in carrot washing units, tea estates and farmlands. That led to the virus spread and most of the tea estate areas were cordoned off as containment zones,” the collector said.
Dr P Balusamy, deputy director of public health, said there were more than 650 containment zones in the Nilgiris. “Large crowds at funerals and marriage functions too contributed to the increase in fresh cases.”
The collector, meanwhile, hoped that the district would see a declining trend in the daily caseload in a week.