With coronavirus cases in Kerala spiking, the Congress has decided to open a state-level control room in the party headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram, to address doubts of people among other objectives. State Congress president Mullapally Ramachandran told the media that the control room is headed by former WHO expert S.S. Lal, who incidentally was the party candidate from the Kazhakootam in the April 6 Assembly elections.

Ramachandran said, the control room has a team of doctors and we have asked similar desks to be opened in all the 14 districts headquarters of the party. The testing done in Kerala was less and the steps taken both by the state and Centre failed to handle the pandemic.

"Health experts for long has been demanding the state government to increase the number of tests to one lakh daily, but it was not done. And when it was increased in the past few days, the total number of positive cases jumped to 72,234 cases, which indicates a spread," he said.

The Congress leader also claimed that there appears to be a slackening down in the health care after the April 6 Assembly elections and that is one reason why the party decided to open such a control room.

On Monday, 13,644 cases were detected from 87,275 samples tested, taking the total number of positive cases to an all-time high of 1,03,004. The infected included around a dozen medical professionals at the Kottayam Medical College hospital The previous high in the total number of cases stood around 97,500 during the months of September/October last year.

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