Sri Lankans restart work after a lengthy COVID-19 caused lockdown, while curfew remained in the high risk districts of Colombo and Gampha.
However as per media release out of the total number of COVID 19 positive patients of 847, more than half of the patients infected, a total of 449 patients are Navy personnel or their close associates.
Regrettably the Navy personnel from the Welisara navy camp who were deployed to quarantine suspected patients became infected probably from the individuals they had traced.
In the past two weeks, there have been 527 new patients diagnosed as COVID 19 positive and of them 437 are Navy personnel and their associates. The other 90 cases came from other known clusters.
The disease spread rapidly in the large camp causing thousands of Navy personnel to be quarantined. Family members and other associates of the Navy personnel from the camp also became infected after sailors on leave went to their home villages in different parts of the country.
This caused clusters to emerge from areas outside the high-risk areas of Colombo, Kalutara and Gampaha which have been on lockdown for nearly 40 days.
Bitter truth is the Navy was given a task and they set about carrying it out, perhaps they should have had better protective gear; because to deal with this threat the government was duty bound to equip these personnel with proper protective gear.
Overall credit must be to the dedicated people in Health Services, ably supported by the Security Forces, Police along with many support services, still are carrying out a very effective and praiseworthy campaign against the COVID 19 threat without criticism.
Northern Breeze 