Unsolved mystery of Karnataka's Patient 52. No one knows how he was infected 

The Karnataka government today said it is yet to solve the "mystery" behind the source of high number of Covid-19 cases in Nanjungud in Mysuru. Nanjungud alone has 65 novel coronavirus cases and there has been little information on how the viral infection reached here.

The first Covid-19 patient in Nanjungud was an employee of a pharmaceutical company. Earlier the state's medical education minister had said the person visited China and contracted the viral infection there.

However, today senior state cabinet minister Suresh Kumar set aside this theory and said the government has not "cracked" the Nanjungud mystery yet.

"No one knows how the first patient contracted the viral infection. We know that around 10 foreign delegates visited the pharmaceutical company. Maybe one of them had the virus and passed it on. One can assume that the infected delegate(s) was asymptomatic. We are getting more details about this," Suresh Kumar said.

The pharma company employee who was the first to test positive for Covid-19 in Nanjungud is designated as 'Patient 52'.

Initially, the state government thought he contracted the infection from the products that the company had imported from China. However, when the products were sent for lab tests, they did not show any presence of Covid-19.

It was following this that state medical education minister Sudhakar claimed that the home ministry has "cracked" the case and that the patient had visited China.

Information of how a patient contracted Covid-19 is very important because it allows health officials to devise a plan and start tracing all people who might have come in contact with the patient. In absence of the source of viral infection in the first person, this exercise becomes difficult, which in turn increases the risk of the disease spreading further.