Why Kerala continues to add to its already bloated Covid caseload

While the Covid-19 fury seems to have cooled down in the rest of the country, Kerala is still registering a daily infection count of over 20,000 cases. But what explains the situation in Kerala? Read on to know.

Kerala seems to be an outlier with a daily infection count of more than 20,000 even as all other states are reporting fewer numbers. The weekly average of new Covid-19 cases in the state has shot up and the reproduction value, an indication of how infectious the virus is going to be, is much higher than the national average. What explains the situation in Kerala? Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, argues that it could be because of higher testing and low seroprevalence score. In a tweet, she wrote: “Kerala is doing nearly three times more tests than West Bengal (which has three times larger population), has seroprevalence around 43% (68% nationally), CFR 0.5% (1.3% nationally).”