Rise in COVID cases: Schools to revert to online mode in Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram: Amid rising COVID-19 cases, the Kerala government on Friday decided to make the classes online for students of standard 1 to 9 from January 21. The decision was taken at a COVID-19 evaluation meeting chaired by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

The government said the online classes for the students will begin on January 21 and continue for two weeks while 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 decision on whether to continue with an online form of classes or not will be taken after the second week of February. The school authorities will be given the authority to shut down the classes for two weeks in case the institution becomes a cluster," the Chief Minister's Office said in a release.

Apart from schools, the government has decided to provide relief to pregnant government staff and said work from home facilities will be made available for them.

"All official events of government and public sector undertakings should be held in a virtual manner," the release said.

The government has decided to request those Sabarimala pilgrims who have booked their slots from January 16 to reschedule their visits.

The evaluation meeting has also decided to restrict the number of persons inside the shops and malls and asked the district authorities to ensure social distancing. 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.

The meeting also directed the health and education departments to jointly ensure that students of Class 10, 11 and 12 get vaccines in their schools.

Kerala on Friday registered 16,338 fresh COVID-19 cases, raising the state's caseload to 53,33,828. 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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, the Kerala High Court has decided to go back to functioning in virtual mode from January 17 due to the spike in Covid cases. The decision to go virtual was taken by the Administrative Committee of the High Court chaired by Chief Justice S. Manikumar and a discussion was held with the Bar Association also.

For one month, the court will function virtually and after that, the Covid-19 situation will be reviewed. On November 22, the court had resumed physical hearings after functioning virtually for more than a year.