COVID-19: Not yet time to be completely relieved, says Ker Minister Shailaja

Thiruvananthapuram, Apr 13 (): Despite COVID-19cases in Kerala showing a dip in the past few days, HealthMinister K K Shailaja on Monday said it was not yet time to be"completely relieved" as neighbouring states were seeing aspike in numbers, which was causing concern.

"We want to bring down the graph of positive cases.That is our effort. We feel our efforts are paying dividends ,if we go by the results in the last few days. However, wecannot be completely relieved just because cases in the statehas dipped.

"It is not enough if the virus are under control inKerala. It is a pandemic. The cases in our neighbouring statesare increasing and that is a cause of concern," the ministertold reporters.

While Tamil Nadu has so far reported 1,075 positivecases and 11 deaths, Karnataka accounts for 247 cases, whichincludes six deaths and 59 discharges.

The nature of this virus is such that at times therewill be very few positive cases and suddenly there will be aspurt if a contact fails to be detected, resulting in theinfection being transmitted to more people, the minister said.

"So, we need to be extremely careful. That is themessage we want to give. Yesterday, there were only twocases", she said adding there have been instances when from 9,COVID-19 cases have jumped to 24 the very next day in thestate.

Strict quarantine, meticulous contact tracing andisolation system have all helped the state to successfullytreat the positive cases.

Kerala reported two coronavirus cases on Sunday and 36were reported cured.

Kasaragod, the hotspot in the state which had the mostnumber of COVID-19 cases, reported 28 cured cases of the total36.

Presently, 194 patients are under treatment acrossvarious hospitals in the state while 1.16 lakh people underobservation and 179 people have been cured.

There have been two fatalities. UD SS