Lucknow: With a renewed surge in Covid-19 cases in Uttar Pradesh, the state government on Monday imposed fresh restrictions in view of the upcoming wedding season. The government has restricted the number of people allowed to attend an indoor event — be it weddings, sports, social, educational, sports, entertainment, cultural, religious, political programmes, or other group activities — to 100 people, with only 50 per cent of the capacity of the venue.

For an outdoor event, held in open spaces like grounds, parks, less than 40 per cent of the area of the programme venue will be allowed to be occupied by people, the government said in an advisory. Face masks, social distancing, thermal scanning, sanitisers, and handwashes will be mandatory at all events – held indoors or outdoors. Till now, 200 people were allowed to attend weddings with the Covid-19 protocol. The government’s fresh directives come amid an increase in the number of people testing positive for coronavirus in the state. After a month of steady decline in the infection, the state has been witnessing a steady increase in the number of new Covid cases in the last one week. On Monday, the state Health Department in its daily bulletin said that a total of 2,067 fresh Covid-19 cases were reported from across the state in the last 24 hours.

With this, the total number of Covid cases in the state has now reached close to 5.30 lakh. The highest number of new cases in the last 24 hours were recorded in Lucknow (315), followed by Meerut (208), Gautam Buddh Nagar (160), Ghaziabad (126) and Kanpur Nagar (125). The total number of deaths from Covid-19 reached 7,582 with 23 more fatalities recorded in the past 24 hours.

Briefing mediapersons, Additional Chief Secretary (Medical and Health) Amit Mohan Prasad said the case-fatality rate of the state now stands at 1.43 per cent. Also, as many as 2,060 coronavirus patients in the state have recovered from the viral disease, and so far 4,97,475 people have recovered from the disease. The count of active cases in the state stands at 23,776, Prasad said. On Sunday, a total of 1,45,704 people were tested for coronavirus, taking the total number of tests to over 1.81 crore. With the rise of Covid cases in Delhi, the state government has already started to conduct random testing of people arriving from Delhi. On Monday, health officials were seen conducting random tests of people arriving on trains from Delhi at Charbagh railway station in Lucknow.

If You Like This Story, Support NYOOOZ

NYOOOZ SUPPORTER

₹ 10 - ₹ 1000

NYOOOZ FRIEND

₹ 2000 - ₹ 5000

Your support to NYOOOZ will help us to continue create and publish news for and from smaller cities, which also need equal voice as much as citizens living in bigger cities have through mainstream media organizations.