33 new COVID-19 cases in Bengaluru, 11 traced to containment zone in DG Halli

Thirty-three coronavirus cases were reported in Bengaluru on Saturday, setting off alarm bells among the health department officials in Karnataka as it is the highest single-day increase in the number of COVID-19 cases reported in the city. 

Eleven cases have been traced to patient 2180, a 38-year-old woman with a history of Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI), who tested positive on May 25. She is a resident of a slum area in DG Halli in Bengaluru and lives with a family of more than 10 members. Many of her family members are among those who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in this cluster, including a two-year-old baby, a five-year-old boy and an eight-year-old boy.

The slum area in DG Halli, where the cases were reported, has been demarcated as a containment zone with no activity allowed inside.

While 11 patients were traced as contacts of the woman, health officials said that several other cases, which are marked as 'contacts under tracing', are also from the same cluster in DG Halli. This takes the number of cases reported in Bengaluru Urban to 336, the highest amongst the districts in the state. 

In the three days prior to Saturday, the state health department reported just 27 cases from Bengaluru, many of whom had returned from abroad or other states, including Tamil Nadu and New Delhi. But the cases reported on Saturday include patients who contracted the virus from the containment zone now marked out in DG Halli. 

The number of cases reported in Karnataka rose to 2,922 on Saturday after 141 cases were recorded in the state. With the rising number of cases, the state health department decided to do away with the mid-day bulletin and will report state-wide figures only in the evening. 

Health officials further confirmed that more than 1 lakh 10 thousand people were currently quarantined across 4,290 quarantine centres in the state. This includes 14,791 people who are under observation for being the primary contacts, and 13,747 people who are the secondary contacts. A total of 997 patients have recovered from the disease in the state.