Kerala Covid Spike Could’ve Been Avoided if Religious Gatherings Were Not Allowed: Govt Panel Director

Things haven’t been going too well for Kerala the last few weeks. Hailed during second wave for its effective strategies to combat Covid-19, the state is now seeing a resurgence in cases, with a serosurvey conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) between June 14 and July 6 pointing that Kerala has least Covid antibodies at 44.4 per cent.

Now Anurag Agrawal, one of the directors of the government’s genome sequencing monitoring agency INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium), has said that the spike in cases could have been avoided if Kerala had not resumed religious gatherings.

Speaking to India Today TV, Agarwal said allowing religious gatherings was a bad idea. “From 13,000 cases to 20,000 cases would not have happened if Kerala had not opened for religious gatherings,” he said adding that the state was behind the pandemic curve as compared to North India and infections would continue to rise in the state.

The constant rise in infections in southern Kerala has posed a big challenge to the state’s overstretched health system and exposed the government to opposition attacks.

The intensity of surge can be gauged when compared with the situation in the neighbouring states. Cases in Tamil Nadu have come down from 20,421 on June 6 — the last occasion when any Indian state reported more than 20,000 infections — to 1,767 cases on Tuesday. Karnataka, which witnessed a high volume of cases in April-May, only reported 1,501 new cases on Tuesday with a TPR of 1.46%. Kerala, on the other hand, continues to report a high number of cases, which have now crossed 3.3 million, second only to Maharashtra which has a caseload of 6.2 million.

The fourth round of the sero survey conducted by the ICMR showed antibody prevalence was 67. 7% nationally but it was only 42.7 % in Kerala, meaning a huge chunk of its population is still susceptible to the virus.

Kerala was the first state to report a Covid case in the country in January 2020 and the pandemic has shown no signs of abating here in the last three months, health ministry statistics show.

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