The approximately 4,000 families in Poonthura, a fishing village near the capital of Trivandrum, were given strict orders to remain in their homes. No one can enter or leave the premises. Businesses are closed and shipping is suspended. The commandos and police patrolled the streets to impose a strict lockdown.
Earlier this month, more than a hundred people in the densely populated villages of Poonthura, hugging the Arabian Sea, hired Covid-19 after some of them visited a fish market. This contributed to a strong buildup of infections in a condition that, in May, gave the impression of having tamed the virus.
“People are confused, remote and tense,” Father Bebinson, the vicar of the local church, told me. “They can’t sense what hit them.”
He’s right. Just two months ago, Kerala seemed like a surprising atypical case in the war opposed to coronavirus in India. But the instances have increased in recent weeks and the state government now says the virus is transmitted through coastal communities, the first admission of its kind through officials to a state since the start of the pandemic in India.
“The genuine outbreak in Kerala is now waning. The virus had been retained in the past in a controlled scenario when the state’s borders were closed,” said Dr. Lal Sadasivan, a Washington-based infectious disease specialist.
In January, Kerala reported the first case of Covid-19 in India, a medical student returning from Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. The number of instances has increased and has become a hot spot. But in March, a dozen states reported more cases than the picturesque southern state.
In May, faithfully following the process of contagion of tests, location and isolation and involving fundamental networks, Kerala particularly reduced its number of instances: there were days when it did not report new instances. “The mark of zero,” the Hindu newspaper said in an editorial about the containment effort. There were breathless stories about the state paving the way. “I don’t forget to say that Kerala had achieved a viral miracle,” says Jayaprakash Muliyil, a prominent epidemiologist.
The celebrations were obviously premature. It took Kerala 110 days to report her first thousand cases. In mid-July, it reported about 800 infections consistent with the day. As of July 20, the number of cases in Kerala had reached 12,000 others, with 43 deaths reported. More than 170,000 people were quarantined, at home and in hospitals.
One reason, experts say, for this strong buildup is that nearly a million employees have returned to the state from Gulf countries and other parts of India after the serious blockade across the country, which shut down businesses and took other people out of their jobs. About 17% of Kerala’s working-age population works out of state.
Unsurprisingly, more than 7,000 of the reported instances to date have a history. “But when restrictions on the displacement of lockout were lifted, other people returned en masse to the state, and it is very unlikely to prevent the re-entry of inflamed bodies,” said Shashi Tharoor, a leading Indian opposition politician and member of Parliament in Trivandrum. .
Mr Tharoor remembers a conversation he had with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan soon after the first repatriation flights carrying Keralites working in the Gulf countries landed in Kerala. “He lamented that not only the virus was coming in, but infected people were transmitting the contagion to fellow passengers on the plane.”
“I think it is inevitable, since each and every citizen has the constitutional right to move the house to India, even if he is sick. But it made a big difference,” Tharoor told me.
The influx would possibly have triggered a strong build-up in the transmission of the local network; since early May, cases with no history of increased transmission have been reported. More than 640 of the 821 new instances reported on Sunday, for example, were hired locally, authorities said. The source of 43 of them is nowhere to be found.
The relaxation of the blockade has led many others to leave their homes and not take sufficient precautions. “Safe laxity was expected when other people began to go to paintings in maximum areas. We are looking to motivate them to be safe,” dr. B Ekbal, head of an expert organization that advises the government on virus prevention, told me.
Some critics say the tests have slowed down after the number of instances has fallen into what is a sign of complacency. Today, Kerala analyses more than 9,000 samples a day, up from 663 in April.
Its detection rate consistent with millions of inhabitants is lower than that of states such as Andhra Pradesh, where instances are also expanding rapidly, or Tamil Nadu, which has long been an access point. But it is ahead of Maharashtra, the country’s largest point to date.
Kerala performs a series of tests: diagnosis, combination, immediate antigen and antibodies, among others, but it is not known how many instances are detected through each of these tests. This increases the number of tests, but it would possibly not reflect the correct image. “The tests have intensified. But that’s never enough. No state should conduct tests as widely as necessary,” says Dr. A Fathahudeen, who leads the intensive care branch at Ernakulam Medical College.
Most epidemiologists think Kerala has done a smart task in general. The rate of jurisprudence (the proportion of other people who died among those who tested positive for the disease) is one of the lowest in India. Hospitals have not yet been hit by the influx of patients. The state has the most powerful public physical fitness formula in India. The government has begun deploying Covid-19 front-line remedy centers with oxygen-equipped beds in many villages.
Kerala is also an uplifting narrative opposed to the media’s unwelcome statements about flattening the curve, which reduces the number of new instances overnight.
Experts say flattening the curve is a long and tortuous journey. Gabriel Leung, an epidemiologist of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong, says that “restrictions will have to be lifted and applied again, and raised and applied again, as long as the population is needed as a total to develop sufficient immunity against the virus.”
T Jacob John, retired professor of virology at Christian Medical College in Vellore, offers an attractive analogy. “Fighting the Covid-19 is like running on a treadmill with increasing speed. As the virus spreads, you must run faster to tame it. It’s exhausting, but there’s no other option,” he says. “It’s a permanent test of power.”