Mangaluru, Mar 29: Dakshina Kannada Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union Limited in a statement announced that their milk collection centres across Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts will be closed on March 29 and 30.
Due to a shortage of storage space with them, the Union has decided to stop collecting milk on these two days, according to the statement issued here on Saturday.
The sale/retail of milk and milk products won’t be affected in these two days.
Udupi, June 2: The number of positive cases may continue to be more in Udupi district since the results of more than 3,000 samples are pending with Labs.
The district total cases to 260. The figure had seemed far-fetched on May 15, when the number of cases stood at just three. The latest spike has been attributed to the return of migrants from other States as well as from abroad. These samples are from people who returned to the district in the last two weeks.
This delay is because the laboratories testing samples from Udupi are burdened with a high case-load after more than 8,500 people returned to the district, particularly from the neighbouring state of Maharashtra.
"Samples have piled up after the influx of people returning from other states and from abroad," says Dr Prashant Bhat, nodal officer for COVID-19 in Udupi. This delay has caused returnees in institutional quarantine to stay on for as long as 18 days.
The designated laboratory for coronavirus testing in Udupi is Wenlock District Hospital in Mangaluru. The district administration also sends samples to laboratories at the Kasturba Hospital in Manipal, Yenepoya Medical College, Mangaluru, KS Hegde Medical Academy, Mangaluru, and Viral Diagnostic Laboratory in Shivamogga. Apart from Udupi, the laboratory in Manipal is also testing samples from Uttara Kannada district. The laboratory in Shivamogga is also testing samples from Shivamogga and Bijapur districts. The laboratories in Mangaluru, similarly, have samples from Dakshina Kannada district.
Dr Avinash Shetty, Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital in Manipal, one of the private laboratories being used by the Udupi district administration, said that they are testing samples in batches. "We received around 600 samples today and we will be testing them now. The backlog of samples should be cleared in the next few days," Dr Avinash said.
All 73 cases reported in Udupi on Monday were patients with travel history of returning from Maharashtra or patients with travel history of returning from abroad.
In cases of some patients who tested coronavirus positive in the past week, people were released from institutional quarantine after a stipulated period only to be tracked down again and admitted in hospitals after their results returned positive.
While two such cases emerged in Belapu and Belman in the district, the administration is now following up with others who were released from institutional quarantine to ensure they remain in home quarantine till their test results are confirmed.
The spike in cases among returning migrants in Udupi also comes at a time the Karnataka government reduced restrictions on interstate travel.
Mangaluru, Jan 1: Led by two local MLAs belonging to Bharatiya Janata Party, dozens of people today forcibly stopped toll fee collection at Talapady toll gate on the outskirts of the city allowing vehicles plying between Karnataka and Kerala on the national highway 66 to travel without paying any fee for some time.
Mangaluru City South MLA D Vedavyasa Kamath and Mangaluru City North MLA Y Bharat Shetty, who led the workers, said that the Navayuga Udupi Tollway Pvt. Ltd. (NUTPL), the concessionaire of the about 90-km-long highway widening project between Talapady and Kundapura in Karnataka, had failed to complete the project since over a decade.
The service roads and two flyovers under the project remained uncompleted. Hence motorists were facing a hardship. Notwithstanding Nalin Kumar Kateel, Dakshina Kannada MP, arranging ₹56 crore loan to the NUTPL through Axis Bank to complete the prominent Pumpwell flyover in the city, the company had failed to complete it.
The MLAs said that they stopped the toll collection as a symbolic protest to bring pressure on the company to complete the project within this month.
The BJP workers who gathered near the toll gate around 7.30 a.m. forcibly removed the barricades and made the vehicles ply without paying the fee. The workers of the company managing the toll booth did not resist.
The BJP workers said that vehicles would ply without paying toll till about 6 p.m. If the company resumed the collection during the day on Wednesday, the party workers would again forcibly stop it on Thursday, they said.
Shivaprasad Rai, in-charge of toll collection of the company at Talapady, Hejmady and Sasthana on the same highway told The Hindu that the NUTPL collected about ₹7 lakh as toll fee daily at Talapady from over 12,000 vehicles. The loss on Wednesday could be about ₹4 lakh.
The project is being implemented under build, operate and transfer basis.
Mangaluru, Apr 3: The laboratory at District Wenlock Hospital has initiated trial for Covid 19 testing, close on the heels of receiving permission from state government.
Doctors, elected representatives and stakeholders had repeatedly demanded that a laboratory should be set up in the port city. Without the lab, the samples were sent either to Shivamogga or to Bengaluru for testing. When Heath Minister Sriramulu had visited Mangaluru on March 17, he had promised a lab in the city for testing of the samples.
Accordingly, the government gave permission for starting the laboratory at Wenlock Hospital. The process of registering the lab with Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) will be completed shortly. The laboratory will be fully operational only after it is registered.
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