Authorities in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday said a second coronavirus case has cropped up, with Health Minister C Viijayabaskar saying the 20-year-old man was a “domestic case” triggering speculation about community transmission, reported The Indian Express. The Union health ministry’s latest update has confirmed 166 cases in India so far with two of them from the state, one of the patients has recovered.
“A 20 years old passenger with travel history to Delhi who tested positive for COVID-19 is stable and under observation in Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, Chennai,” the state government’s statement said, according to The News Minute. “He will be discharged after two consecutive samples tested negative.” The man is currently in isolation, and his condition is stable.
The state’s health minister said the man came to Chennai via train from Delhi on March 12, and added that officials were engaged in tracing all those who he came in contact with in the past few days. Viijayabaskar added that he had no history of travelling to another country.
“All I can say is that the first positive case in the state was imported since that patient had visited Oman,” the state health minister said. “This is a domestic case.”
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Preliminary contact tracing showed the man, a professional hairdresser, left his native place in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, on March 7 for New Delhi. He boarded the train to Chennai on March 12. Following this, he arrived at the hospital in Chennai on March 17 with symptoms of COVID-19. “I received a message from the dean (of the hospital) that he has tested positive. Now we will be tracking the epidemiology link,” Vijayabaskar added.
An unidentified official claimed the man may have contracted the virus through “local transmission” during the trip to Chennai, or got infected in Delhi.
The Tamil Nadu health minister also spoke about the first coronavirus patient in the country and said that the person was discharged, and has been in home quarantine for two weeks. The first person to test positive for the coronavirus had visited Oman,
Meanwhile, authorities have not described this case as community transmission. “In Delhi, this man had come in contact with a person with foreign travel history,” a senior officer from the Department of Public Health and Medicine told NDTV. “Only when many such people report we can call it community transmission.”
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