Alarm bells ring as Corona secondary contacts test positive in Telangana

Hyderabad: Secondary contacts are testing positive in the state, which has become a major concern for the health department as they will neither have any travel history nor contact history.

The teams on the ground have a big task on hand as they have to connect dots to identify the source from where they got the infection. Such cases are being seen in the identified hotspot districts including Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Medchal, Vikarabad and Nizamabad (urban districts).

It may be mentioned here that until recently positive cases were confined to people with travel history of overseas or Delhi or primary contacts who used to be either family or relatives, most of the time.

However, post-Markaz incident, secondary contacts have also come into picture. People who returned from Delhi were found to have gone to places of worship everyday in their localities for a few days until government brought them under its radar.

In the meantime, not only family members but also others got exposed to Delhi returnees.

A senior doctor working on the ground in the Old City, where secondary contacts are being reported, stated that secondary contacts would not have any idea how they got infection as none known to them directly tested positive to the virus.

He said this cannot be called a community transmission yet because when community transmission takes place a large number of positive cases would come out in any area without known source of infection in them.

Against this backdrop, the Telangana health department has called upon people having flu like symptoms to contact nearest government health centre even if they don't have travel or contact history in their families.

The objective is to ensure such secondary contacts report to authorities without any delay so that Covid-19 test could be done on them early, health authorities said.