President's Office orders reduction of staff on active duty

The President's Office, on Tuesday, issued a directive instructing government office and agencies to minimise onsite human resources, in response to the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases.

Effective on all islands which the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has confirmed positive COVID-19 cases, the directive also instructed state agencies to close by 1400 except and discourage staff from working past 1600 hrs, except in emergency situations.

State institutions were also urged to maximise the utilisation of online resources to ensure the uninterrupted provision of essential services.

Furthermore, government offices and agencies must guarantee adherence to the regulations established by the Civil Service Commission (CSC) under the guidance of HPA, to regulate sanitisation, hygiene and social distancing.

Maldives recently recorded a spike in the number of COVID-19 cases, which has been increasing throughout January, with several clusters found in capital Male’ as well as some southern islands and operational resorts.

Due to the surge, HPA recently announced a two-week curfew from 2300hrs to 0430hrs in the capital region, while vehicle movements are banned between 2030 to 0430 hrs.

During these two weeks, HPA will also implement a ban on parks and other public spaces, with the exception of outdoor gyms which may be used for individual exercise in accordance with virus safety guidelines. Similarly, team sports are also temporarily banned.

Furthermore, in a new first, HPA mandated individuals permitted to travel from Male' to other islands for essential and urgent purposes, to obtain a negative PCR test 72-hours prior to departure.

According to the Health Protection Emergency Operations Centre (HEOC), 30 percent of the recently identified cases are believed to be the highly contagious new variant that emerged in the United Kingdom late last year.

Currently, the island nation records a total of 16,155 virus cases of which 1,833 are active cases, in addition to 14,263 recoveries and 52 deaths.

On March 12, 2020, WHO classified the spread of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. To date, the new strain of novel coronavirus has infected over 1 billion people and claimed over 2.2 million lives around the world. However, out of those infected, more than 76.3 million people have recovered.