K’taka enforces 2-week lockdown amid surge

BENGALURU: Karnataka chief minister B S Yediyurappa on Friday announced a complete lockdown from 6am on May 10 to 6am on May 24 amid a massive surge in Covid-19 cases across the state.

“The second wave of Covid-19 is creating havoc across the state and the ‘corona curfew’ imposed in the state has not yielded expected results in reducing the infections and death rate.

Therefore, the government has decided to impose stringent measures to check the spread of the disease and deaths,”

Yediyurappa said on Friday after a series of meetings with senior cabinet ministers and officials in the state capital.

The new restrictions are not very different from those that are already in force now as essential shops and establishments will be allowed to remain open from 6am to 10am.

However, a confusion erupted after the announcement as the chief minister and chief secretary contradicted each other. “Not a lockdown, these are restrictions,” chief secretary P Ravi Kumar said minutes after a briefing by Yediyurappa. “Difference (between existing restrictions and newly announced ones) is that daytime vehicle movement will not be allowed,” he added.

The state government, which hesitated to use the word lockdown in the past, finally resorted to it after the earlier imposed restrictions yielded little or no results to contain the pandemic surge.

On Friday, the state reported 592 Covid-related fatalities, of which 346 were in Bengaluru. The fatality rate reached 1.21%, according to the daily bulletin of the state health department.

The state also recorded 48,781 new infections, taking its active case count to 536,641.

The positivity rate stood at 30.28%, according to the bulletin.