LUCKNOW/ BENGALURU: Both Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka are seeing a surge in fresh Covid-19 cases fuelled by returnees to the states.
With approximately 20 lakh migrant workers having returned to UP in one and half months, it is going through, what health officials called, a ‘fourth Covid surge’. They said that about 70% of the cases being reported in the state in the past two weeks involve migrants.
What presses alarm bells is that the case positivity rate among symptomatic migrants was as high as 22%. “Over 4.75 lakh migrant workers quarantined at home have been surveyed by ASHA workers. In all, they screened 565 persons with symptoms who were tested for covid-19. The lab reports of 117 is out and it revealed that 26 tested positive while the remaining 91 were found negative. This suggests that the positivity rate among migrants was 22.2% which is several folds higher when compared with the corresponding figure of 2.6% for UP,” said principal secretary health and family welfare Amit Mohan Prasad.
In Karnataka, of the 897 individuals who tested positive in the first 20 days of this month, 433, or 48%, had returned from other states.
Among the returnees who tested positive, 322 came from Maharashtra, 59 from Gujarat and 31 from Rajasthan. The rest came from other states.
Source : TOI
