After a week when it registered around one lakh new COVID cases with over 20,000 cases daily, Kerala on Monday saw its daily tally dip to 13,984, an official statement said.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, in the statement, said the cases came from 1,27,903 samples tested in the past 24 hours, taking the daily test positivity rate to 10.93.

The TPR in the state was hovering in the rate of 13 per cent in the days when over 20,000 new cases were reported practically every day in the past week.

Another 118 COVID deaths were reported, taking the death toll to 16,955.

Meanwhile, the Central health team officials continued their tour of the state in two batches and are expected to call on top health officials.

The figures for Monday is likely to bring some relief for Vijayan as he has come under fire from several quarters as despite the state under partial lockdown for the past 85 days, the daily number of cases was rising so was the TPR and presently Kerala is leading the rest of the country in most of the COVID indicators.

Moreover with the state all set to celebrate Onam, the traditional harvest festival, from the third week of this month with the Thiru Onam on August 21, the entire trading community are up in arms and have threatened to break the COVID protocols and open their shops from August 9.

Incidentally, the reduced TPR comes a day before when the high power monitoring committee is all set to meet to revise lockdown norms and according to sources, this time there is every likelihood to do away with the existing norm of locking down local bodies based on its TPR and instead only the clusters where there are cases will be locked down.

Also on the anvil is the plan of lifting the total lockdown, under which all Saturdays and Sundays in the past two months saw complete lockdowns.

(This story was published from a syndicated feed. Only the headline and picture has been edited by FIT)