Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has stressed on the importance of keeping COVID-19 transmission down in the State till the general public can be covered by vaccination against the disease.
Addressing mediapersons here on Wednesday, Mr. Vijayan said that Kerala had adopted the strategy of keeping disease transmission in the community at the lowest levels so that hospitalisations and deaths can be reduced. He said that the results of the latest round of seroprevalence study done in the State by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) justifies the success of the containment strategy adopted by the State.
ICMR’s seroprevalence study done in December shows that disease prevalence in the State at 11.6% was just half of the sero prevalence (21%) at the national level. While this points to the effective containment strategy of the State, the public was being misled to believe that Kerala’s COVID strategy had failed, Mr. Vijayan said.
He said that the ICMR survey had proved that Kerala was on the right track as far as COVID strategy was concerned but on the other side, the survey also pointed to the fact that Kerala still had a huge population susceptible to COVID. This meant that the vigil against COVID had to remain high.
So it was important that disease transmission in the community was contained well. If the State was now reporting more cases, it was because the State had the system and facility to track and report all cases, he claimed.
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