Kerala Minister for Electricity MM Mani has contracted COVID-19. He posted on Facebook that he has tested positive and is getting admitted at the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College Hospital for treatment. The minister has also requested all those who had come in contact with him in recent days to be cautious. The private staff of the minister has gone into quarantine.
Minister Mani is 75 years old. There were reports about Minister Mani undergoing surgery in June this year, after suffering internal bleeding.
He is the fourth minister in Kerala to be infected with the coronavirus. Earlier, three ministers — Thomas Isaac (Finance), EP Jayarajan (Industries) and VS Sunil Kumar (Agriculture) — had tested positive for the coronavirus and all of them have since recovered.
Minister Sunil Kumar had tested positive towards the last week of September. He too was admitted at the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College Hospital. Days before that, Minister Jayarajan had contracted COVID-19 and got himself admitted to the Pariyaram Medical College in Kannur. Minister Jayaraj was recently admitted to a hospital for dizziness after he had recovered from COVID-19. He has since been stable.
Kerala has been witnessing a sharp spike in COVID-cases in recent weeks and there are, as of Wednesday evening, 92,161 active cases in the state. On Wednesday, the state has, for the first time, recorded over 10,000 new cases — 10,606 to be specific — of COVID-19 in a day. However, this is after increasing the number of testing samples to 73,816 from 50 to 60 thousand samples in recent days.
However, a good number of recoveries are also being recorded every day. On Wednesday 6,161 people tested negative for the virus. With that the total number of recoveries in the state is 1,60,253. Kozhikode has reported the most number of cases on Wednesday with 1,576 new infections, followed closely by Malappuram (1,350 cases), Ernakulam (1,201 cases) and Thiruvananthapuram (1,182 cases).