Kerala BJP chief K. Surendran tests COVID positive

Kerala BJP president K. Surendran tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday. He has been admitted to a private hospital in Kozhikode and is under observation. Reportedly, he had only recently returned from Delhi after meeting national BJP leaders. 

The news of his testing positive comes just two days after he appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to send a central team to Kerala on account of the high incidence of COVID-19 there. In a letter to Modi, Surendran pointed out Kerala accounted for "nearly 26 per cent of total active COVID-19 cases in India". 

A day later, the health ministry said the Centre would be sending a high-level team to support public health interventions for COVID-19 management in Kerala as the state has been reporting a "very high" number of daily coronavirus cases. The team headed by the Director of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr S.K. Singh, will reach Kerala on Friday.

Surendran informed Modi "Kerala's average daily COVID-19 cases stay at the same level as last week despite a dip in the number of tests. State's test positivity ratio touched 10 per cent again last week when national average is at 2 per cent."

Surendran declared "Kerala's test positivity rate was five times that of the national average. Kerala has the highest number of active cases per million population."

"Out of 20 districts in India having highest number of active cases, 12 are in Kerala," Surendran told Modi, adding the state also had the highest percentage of the elderly population in the country.

Asking Modi to "personally intervene," Surendran sought the deployment of a central medical team to Kerala, "considering high test positivity rates in Kerala's 12 districts".

Surendran also sent copies of the letter to Home Minister Amit Shah and Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan.