No night curfew in Kerala but schools revert to online mode as Covid-19 cases peak

Thiruvananthapuram: With Covid cases surging in the state, the Kerala government has decided to shift classes till ninth to online mode of education. A decision to this effect was taken in a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. The meeting also decided against the imposition of a night curfew or a Sunday lockdown.

COVID-19 | Kerala govt decides to suspend off-line classes up to 9th standard. Decision made in the high-level meeting held today: Chief Minister's Office — ANI (@ANI) January 14, 2022

Though classes till grade nine will shift to online mode from January 21 for two weeks, the other classes will continue to be offline. To maintain strict Covid data management, all the concerned departments have been directed to coordinate to prepare the data.

The state capital district and Ernakulum district has been recording the highest daily cases in the past one week and on Thursday alone the test positivity rate jumped to 20 per cent and there were over 13,000 cases.

Authorities have been asked to identify if there are clusters or developing clusters of a high number of cases. Pregnant women working in the government have been allowed to work from home and all government offices have been asked to have only online programmes.

It has also been decided to restrict the number of people at weddings and funerals to 50 wherever the TPR is 20 per cent and in places where it is above 30 per cent, there should be no public functions.

Shops and establishments should ensure that they promote online bookings and sales and in malls, there should be only one person in every 25 sq ft space, the meeting decided.

It was also advised to see that authorities should reach the educational institutions to give the first dose vaccine to students and complete it at the earliest.

Even when fresh guidelines have been announced, there is no word on curtailing or postponing the ongoing district party meetings of the ruling CPI-M which is currently on and Vijayan himself was addressing the Thiruvananthapuram district CPI-M`s party inauguration on Friday at the capital city outskirts at Parasala.

Now with he leaving to the US on Saturday early morning for his medical treatment and will not be returning till the 29th of this month, it`s very unlikely if there will be more lockdown norms imposed till then.