A three-year-old child who arrived at Kochi airport with his parents from Italy via Dubai on Saturday has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, taking the number of patients in Kerala to six.

“They arrived on March 7 by Emirates’ Flight EK530,” S. Suhas, collector for Ernakulam where Kochi is located, told reporters on Monday.

He said the coronavirus helpdesk at the airport had the child moved to the Government Medical College Hospital in Kalamassery near the airport and sent his blood samples for tests.

The results, which came on Monday, were positive for the virus.

Suhas said: “The father and the mother too have been admitted to the isolation ward at the hospital.”

The state health department has begun tracing all the other passengers who had arrived on the flight so they can be under observation for the next two weeks.

At Mangalore in neighbouring Karnataka, a man who had arrived from Dubai with fever late on Sunday refused to cooperate with health officials and left a hospital without giving his blood samples.

The coronavirus helpdesk had spotted him during the screening of all international passengers after he arrived on a Jet Airways flight.

He was taken to the isolation ward at the government-run Wenlock District Hospital. But he told the healthcare team “I’m not sick” and walked out with his parents, who had arrived at the hospital from their home in Thalapady, near the Kerala border, in the early hours of Monday.

They apparently did not return home. Eventually, district officials in Dakshina Kannada managed to track him and persuade him to get quarantined.

On February 29, a family of three Indian adults arriving from coronavirus-hit Italy had left Kochi airport without reporting to the helpdesk as required and travelled 200km to their home in Pathanamthitta. They and two neighbours tested positive on March 7.

Earlier, three Keralite medical students who had returned from Wuhan in China in January had tested positive. They are cured and have been discharged.

Since March 3, Kochi airport has been screening every arriving international passenger, a practice that was on Monday extended even to domestic passengers.