Kerala recorded the highest number of COVID-19 cases in a single day with 133 persons testing positive for the novel coronavirus on Sunday.
Thrissur district recorded 16 of the new cases, Palakkad 15, Kollam 13, Idukki 11 and Alappuzha, Kottayam, Malappuram, Kozhikode and Kannur ten cases each.
Thiruvananthapuram has 9 new cases. Pathanamthitta recorded eight new cases while Kasargode has six new cases and Ernakulam has 5. One health worker in Idukki has also got infected.
Out of the 133 new cases, 80 are returnees from Gulf countries- Kuwait-35, Saudi Arabia-18, UAE-13, Behrain-5, Oman-5, Qatar-2, Egypt-1 and Djibouti-1. Forty three patients returned from others states. Of this 17 returned from Tamil Nadu, 16 from Maharashtra, Delhi-3, Gujarat-2, West Bengal-2, Uttar Pradesh-2 and Haryana 1. The source of infection for 9 persons was traced to contact history. Three people each from Thrissur and Idukki contracted the infection from confirmed COVID-19 patients, the source of infection in two people in Palakkad and one person in Ernakulam was also classified as due to contact history.
Ninety three people were discharged on Sunday. These include 37 people from Thrissur, 30 of Malappuram, 9 of Alappuzha, five of Kozhikode, four of Pathanmathitta, three of Kottayam, two each of Kannur and Kasaragod and one of Palakkad whose test samples returned negative.
The number of active cases now stands at 1490 while a total of 1,659 people have been recovered. As many as 1,43,969 people are under surveillance in the state now. 1,41,919 of them are either under institutional or home quarantine and 2050 are under isolation in hospitals. 325 people have been admitted to hospitals on Sunday.
5239 samples were sent for testing in the past 24 hours. Samples of 1,37,475 people have been sent for examination so far of which result of 3460 are yet to return. 38,146 samples have been tested as a part of sentinel surveillance and 36,751 of them returned negative.
A total of 1,83,201 samples have been tested in all categories including the routine ones, augmented sampling, sentinel surveillance, pooled sentinel, CB-NAAT and TrueNat. The state has 109 hotspots as of June 21.
This is the fifth time that Kerala’s COVID-19 caseload crossed the three-digit mark. It was 111 on June 5, 108 on June 6, 107 on June 7 and 118 on June 19.