Number of those who attended Tablighi convention swell in South India

The number of people who had attended

the Tablighi Jamaat congregation and infected with novel Coronavirus continued to swell in south India, with Tamil Nadu reporting the bulk of it.

With a total of 411 confirmed cases, Tamil Nadu came behind Maharashtra, which has the maximum positive cases of 490.

As many as 100 people from Tamil Nadu who had attended the Delhi meet tested positive on Friday, showing an upward trend after a marginal dip on Thursday.

Three people in Karnataka who were part of the Islamic congregation in Nizamuddin West in Delhi also tested positive for COVID-19, adding to the total number of confirmed cases in the state which touched 128, the Health department said.

 

The Telangana government said it has identified all those who had returned to the state after attending the religious congregation in Delhi.

In Tamil Nadu, where the total number of cases have seen a sharp rise for the last three days following tests conducted on the Delhi returnees, a total of 364 people who had attended the meet in the national capital have tested positive so far.

On Wednesday, the state reported 110 positive cases while the number stood at 75 on Thursday with all but one being returnees from the recent Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi's Nizamuddin West, the country's biggest hotspot of the pandemic.

Health Secretary Beela Rajesh said that of the 102 who tested positive today, 100 were Jamat meet returnees, another man had come back from the US and the source for one more person was being ascertained.

In Telangana, as per Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao's directives to shift those who returned from Delhi and their symptomatic family members to isolation centres and test them for coronavirus, the authorities were conducting the tests on a war footing, the government said.

The state has seen the most fatalities in south, with nine of the deceased having had a history of attending the religious meeting at Nizamuddin.