The 25 coronavirus patients reported from one family at Sangli in Maharashtra were discovered to be living in a congested setup, which led the infection to spread fast among them, officials informed.
Congested Dwelling Led To COVID-19 Spread
According to a report published by PTI, four family members who returned from Saudi Arabia tested positive for coronavirus on March 23. Within a week of it, 21 more family members, including a two-year-old boy, were found to have caught the infection.
The district administration, though, reported that so far there is no ‘community transmission’ of the viral infection, as only known contacts have been exposed to it.
“These 25 patients from Islampur tehsil belong to a big family living in a congested housing set up and because of that, they got infected,” said collector Abhijeet Chaudhari.
One big family
It is reported that all the patients are from one big family and they live “side by side” in Islampur and the majority of the family members were in touch with each other round-the-clock, from which the exposure took place.
“If a coronavirus positive person coughs in the house, his droplets spread on objects in the room. The common objects are handled by everyone in the house and this is the way the virus spreads,” District civil surgeon C S Salunkhe explained.
“Following the detection of initial cases, we admitted several people from the family even if they did not have any symptoms and that proved beneficial as we could detect a large number of cases,” said Salunkhe.
The detection of the large number is good because if they remained undetected, all these coronavirus positive people could have been roaming in the community, he added.
“After the detection of all these positive cases, the issue got highlighted in the town and people chose to stay indoors,” he added.
When Chaudhari was asked about any errors in quarantining the four family members who returned from Saudi Arabia, he said they arrived at the Mumbai airport on March 12 and that time, the screening process was not started.
“The four family members should have taken care by remaining in-home quarantine after they came back to Sangli,” Salunkhe said.
Containment zone
The collector said a ‘containment zone’ has been created in a one-km radius of the area where the family lives in Islampur and 325 of their ‘non-close contacts’ have been home quarantined to further check the spread of infection.
In the meantime, samples of 47 family members and their close-contacts were sent for testing and 25 of them turned out positive for coronavirus.
“All the 25 family members are currently admitted at an isolation facility in Sangli. They are undergoing treatment and their health is stable,” Chaudhari said.
“Though the remaining family members have tested negative, we have kept them under institutional quarantine and they are being monitored,” he said.
