The coronavirus is not going to look at a person’s religion before infecting one, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan raised his head and said these words to the media on Wednesday evening. Even before anyone had asked about the Tablighi Jamaat meeting in Delhi’s Nizamudeen, the CM said that this was just not the time to embark on a communal mission.
Messages attacking Islam had begun to go around, ever since the religious gathering in Nizamudeen emerged as an epicenter of COVID-19 in many parts of the country. As many as 270 people from Kerala had attended it, and 60 are now under observation for the disease.
“People have attended weddings and other functions before all this had become so worse. This is another such gathering. It is afterward that we had the lockdown. But now some people with vested interests have begun campaigns to spread intolerant messages attacking a religion. This is a time of an epidemic. This is a time we need to stick together,” Pinarayi said.
Wednesday’s press meet, the first of a new month, raised some hope. The numbers in Kerala are not going up rapidly, though things could change anytime. There are 24 new cases reported on Wednesday, and two recoveries, taking the total infected to 265, with 237 still under treatment and two elderly people have passed away in recent days.
Nine of the 24 new cases are of people who have come from abroad, the rest got it through contact, the CM said.
Among the total 265, 191 are Malayalis who flew in to the state, seven are foreigners, which means the 67 others got it through contact. Twenty six patients in this got their tests negative after treatment and four foreigners are among them.
More than 1.6 lakh people are under observation on April 1, with 622 of them admitted in hospitals. A month ago – March 1, this number was 206 in total, with 13 in hospitals. It was still early days and the hope was that the precautions need to continue till the end of March. But that was before the virus had spread to the rest of the country and all of the globe.
The CM of the first affected state in the country managed to give small pieces of good news – 232 Europeans have flown back to their country from the state, testing facilities are much better with 100 to 150 samples taken everyday, Kasargod Medical College would be a full fledged COVID hospital in four days, 16 and a half lakh people got their food grains in the first day of free ration distribution and 1316 community kitchens are providing food to more than two and a half lakh people. More than two lakh volunteers have registered to serve during the outbreak.
There is also good news in the border front – 2153 goods trucks have managed to reach the state without issue. Even so, seven people in Kasargod who needed treatment and couldn’t reach a hospital in Karnataka on time have died.
But the lockdown has to continue, he said, and several thousand cases have already been registered and arrests made of the defaulters. “Cases under the Epidemic Act will need to be registered next,” he warned the wanderers.