Only fully vaccinated allowed in Puducherry hotels, malls for New Year celebrations

Puducherry: The Puducherry Health Department has instructed all the hotels, malls, restaurants, cinema theatre owners to only allow individuals who are fully vaccinated against COVID to enter their premises for New Year celebrations.

G Sriramulu, Director Health, Puducherry, said, "For New Year celebrations on December 31st all hotels, restaurants, malls, cinemas have been instructed to allow only fully vaccinated people. For vaccination, about 8.24 lakh were vaccinated with the first dose and about 5.40 lakh with the second dose vaccine."

He further said, "As per PM's message, we are going to start booster (precautionary) dose next month. We are planning to vaccinate (students under) 15-18 years in the school itself, and dropped out school children will be immunized at their houses."

Sriramulu also said that two persons have been infected with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 on Tuesday. Of the two, one is an 80-year-old man and another is a 20-year-old woman.

The octogenarian was tested positive in the first week of December and was discharged. His samples were sent for genome sequencing and results came positive, he said.