With five Covid-19 deaths over the past 24 hours, Goa reported the highest single day deaths in three weeks. What is also disturbing is that Nipah virus has returned to haunt Kerala with a 12-year old boy on Sunday succumbing to the infection, the first such incident three years after it wrecked havoc in parts of Kozhikode and Malappuram districts.
It is learnt that 188 contacts with the boy who succumbed to the infection have been identified. The new crisis came as Kerala continues to grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic, with around 25,000 cases being detected every day.
Of the total 4.1 lakh active cases of the disease in India, as many as 2.5 lakh are in Kerala. The Nipah infection travels from bats to humans and some other animals including dogs and horses.
All other infections in 2018 were cases of human-to-human transmission of the virus. During the outbreak in Kerala in 2018, 17 patients confirmed to have been infected, died.
Several people travel from Kerala to Goa every single day. Even as there is a need to quarantine people coming from Kerala to Goa to check the spread of Covid-19 infection, it also seems necessary to be on guard against the Nipah virus.
