Communist Party of India (Marxist) candidate KK Shailaja, who is also the Kerala Health Minister, is leading by a huge margin of almost 61,000 votes in the Mattannur constituency against her competitors Illikkal Augusthy of Revolutionary Socialist Party of Kerala (Bolshevik), and Biju Elakkuzhi of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The initial trends predict that she will clinch victory soon, riding high on the goodwill of her Covid-19 management work in the past year.
Shailaja, who is also a retired teacher, became popular after doing stellar work in containing the spread of COVID-19 in the initial phase of the pandemic, in the state of Kerela. While casting her vote in the single-phase state assembly polls held on April 6, Shailaja told Hindustan Times, “The Covid-19 mortality rate in Kerala is too low, 0.4 percent. Kerala is thickly populated…We were able to contain the virus. Now the pace of the spread of the virus has declined,… it is lower than other states… We brought many social welfare measures since the start of the pandemic, such as the supply of food kits for needy people and community kitchens. We also supplied proper medicines for the non-Covid-19 patients. People are seeing all this and they will vote for us.”
She had previously worked on the containment of the Nipah virus as well. Kerala had seen the Nipah virus outbreak twice, in 2018 and 2019. Shailaja has received many praises for her prompt action in tracking, isolation, and containment of the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The union health secretary Preeti Sudan, while praising the COVID-19 surveillance protocol of Kerala, asked other states and union territories to take a leaf out of Shailaja’s book in dealing with the pandemic.
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