the government on the issue. The state task force on COVID-19 at a meeting last week opposed the decision to resume more classes at schools.
Gaikwad was not present at the meeting.
The minister mentioned that municipal commissioners in urban areas and collectors and Zilla Parishad CEOs in rural areas have been given discretion to take decision. “There is no compulsion (on the state government’s part) to reopen schools. The COVID task force members were not aware of our Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). There will be a meeting again. Our (education department’s) secretary is studying the SOP of the task force,”
BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis said there was no coordination between the task force, education minister Gaikwad and Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on the issue, creating confusion.
All stake-holders should sit together and arrive at a consensus, the former chief minister said. Health authorities in Maharashtra’s Gondia district have started tracing close contacts of two women who were found infected with the Delta plus variant of coronavirus, considered highly infectious, an official said on Thursday.
As many as 105 swab samples collected from the district were sent to the National Institute of Virology in Pune in the last week of June for genome sequencing and two of them tested positive for the Delta plus variant, according to Dr Nitin Kapse, District Health Officer.
Though both the patients, women aged 19 and 45, have…
