The Effects of Migration in the Transmission Dynamics of COVID-19 in Kerala, India

Abstract

Nowadays, the new narrative is the transformation of a zoonotic virus into
an international predicament called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection which is affecting millions. In this
pandemic situation, universal migration has had an adverse impact on the
world healthcare scenario. As Kerala is a source destination for international
migration and destination for internal and return migration, this paper
aims to investigate the transmission dynamics of Corona Virus Disease
2019 (COVID-19) in Kerala in the light of migration. The study was
conducted after creating a crowd-sourced dashboard on the details of the
COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala which is available in the public domain
(https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3818096). The data of the COVID-19
situation in Kerala, which is crowdsourced, curated, and scientifically
presented using the open data standards, formed the basis of this study.
The study demonstrates that, even before community spread, return and
internal migration has increased the spread of the infection in Kerala,
particularly in the second phase of the disease outbreak. The largest
number of COVID-19 positive cases in Kerala have been reported among
migrants from the Middle East countries