COVID-19: Pinarayi Vijayan rules out complete lockdown in Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram, Sep 03: Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Friday ruled out imposing a complete lockdown in the state amid covid surge.

Vijayan said a statewide lockdown was not an option as it would adversely affect the economy and the livelihood of the people and asked everyone to strictly follow the quarantine protocol or else fine will be levied.

"No one supports measures like statewide lockdown. This will create a huge crisis for the economy and livelihoods. Expert opinion is that we need to build social immunity and move back to normal. Caution should not be compromised at all," Vijayan said.

Vijayan, who was speaking at a virtual meeting of statewide local self government body representatives and officials, said the state was able to keep the case fatality rate at around 0.5 per cent even when the test positivity rate was around 18-20 per cent.

"Neighbourhood committees, comprising government officials, volunteers, resident associations, would be set up for COVID-19 mitigation. Intervention should be made to reduce the spread in the state. The neighbourhood committees, rapid response team, ward-level committees, police and sectoral magistrates should implement the restrictions and control the spread," Vijayan said.

"We have already given the first dose of vaccine to 74 per cent of the people and second dose to 27 per cent of the population. All health workers and frontline workers have been administered with the first dose of vaccine and 86 per cent of them received the second jab," he said.

Kerala has been reporting around 30,000 cases for the last two weeks and on Friday recorded 29,322 new infections and 131 COVID-19 related deaths, taking the infection count to 41,51,455 and the death toll to 21,280.