Kerala reports 1,544 Covid-19 cases; health minister Veena George holds meeting

Kerala on Saturday reported 1,544 new Covid-19 cases which took the number of active patients in the state to 7,972 prompting state Health Minister Veena George to call a high-level meeting to assess the situation.

For the past five days, Kerala has been reporting over 1,000 coronavirus cases each day.

After the meeting, George said the health department was closely monitoring the situation and there was no new variants. "Closely monitoring the situation analytically. No new variants. It is the omicron variant so far. The health department is doing the genomic and spike protein sequencing," the Minister told PTI.

George said there was no need to worry and urged everyone to wear masks and get vaccinated. The high-level meeting noted that Ernakulam, Thiruvananthapuram and Kottayam districts were having the most number of cases and the district authorities were instructed to conduct more tests.

The health department also instructed the district authorities to create awareness among the people to take the second dose and the precautionary dose at the regular intervals. "Even though all those above 18 years have taken the first dose of vaccine, the second dose vaccination in the same age group is 88 per cent. Till now, 22 per cent of people have taken the precautionary dose. Vaccines will be ensured to all students," the Minister later said in a release.

The state had recorded 1,197 new positive cases and five deaths on May 31. On June 1, the state reported 1,370 cases and six deaths, whereas on June 2 the new cases were 1,278 and 20 Covid-19-related deaths. There were 1,465 new cases and 13 deaths on June 3. The Covid-19 dashboard of Kerala shows that the state has 65,63,910 confirmed cases till now and 69,790 coronavirus-related deaths.