Schools in Kerala will reopen on a limited scale in November after a Covid-enforced break of close to two years. A Covid review meeting on Saturday instructed the Health and Education Departments to draw up guidelines so that classes can resume at the higher levels with a common examination.

Hotels and bars may have to wait for longer before they can offer in-person/in-house services. The hospitality sector, including bar owners, has been raising the demand for some time now.

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The review meeting discussed the demand from the hospitality sector to give the all-clear to resume but deferred a decision for a later date. Sources said that it did not take up the issue of reopening of bars while it could not arrive at a consensus on opening cinema theatres.

A major step towards a phased ‘unlock’ related to lifting of restrictions was allowing more local body wards to open up after the threshold for Weekly Infection Population Ratio was raised from 8 per cent to 10 per cent.

Timetable set

Earlier on Saturday, Education Minister V Sivankutty said the Higher Education Department has prepared the time table for offline Plus-One examinations, which will start on September 24 and end on October 18, after the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to the State only the previous day.

The Education Department has already announced that higher educational institutions (medical and engineering) and professional colleges will be open from October 4, and preparations are on to resume classes for the final year/semester for all streams, to begin with.

Kerala has covered 88.94 per cent of its eligible population with the first dose of a Covid vaccine after the Centre readjusted estimated population projections for States on Saturday. The second dose has been administered to 36.67 per cent. Only 29 lakh more are left to be inoculated with the first dose.

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