It was on January 30, 2020 that a medical student, who returned to Thrissur in Kerala from the Chinese province of Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus, tested positive. India’s first coronavirus patient from Kerala had fully recovered after 39 days of isolation. “It was not easy to remain isolated for so long but the counselors regularly called me, paying attention to my mental health,” the 20-year-old student at a state-run university in China’s Wuhan, the epicentre of coronavirus outbreak told last year after recovering from the pandemic.
Kerala, where the country’s first COVID-19 case was detected, had quickly became the posterchild for pandemic management with its low mortality rate. But recently, the state has been logging the highest daily cases and is the third most affected state in the country after Maharashtra and Karnataka. Kerala has the highest number of active cases accounting for about 42 per cent of the approximately 1.7 lakh active caseload. It is followed by Maharashtra. Active case count, reflecting those still recovering from COVID-19, is used as a measure to check the spread of a disease. With the fresh infections on Friday, the state’s total Covid-19 caseload has risen to 9,17,630 while 6,398 recoveries took the total number of those discharged to 8,41,444,the state government said. The virus has so far claimed 3,704 lives in the state with 22 recent deaths being added to the toll on Friday.
