Trade unions threaten to ‘force 10-day lockdown’

COLOMBO: A collective of trade unions across multiple sectors threatened to “force” a 10-day lockdown starting next Monday.

Declaring their intent to force a lockdown, Inter-Company Employees’ Union Chairman and former Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) MP Wasantha Samarasinghe sai that, if the government doesn’t announce a “scientific lockdown” by Friday, all workers in both government and private sectors, estates and other sectors of the economy will go into a self-imposed lockdown starting Monday.

The unions’ demand comes as media reports said business in at least 31 towns across the island have suspended operations in the face of surging COVID-19 deaths and infections, many of which are attributed to the fast-spreading delta variant of SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes the disease.

Many businesses will be closed over the next two weeks, reports said, as COVID-19 continues to ravage the country’s health sector.

State Minister Channa Jayasumana told parliament that three mutations of the delta variant have been discovered in Sri Lanka.

Jayasumana also blamed the spike in cases on the wave of protest marches and demonstrations that swept the country in July.

Though the protests have now come to a halt in view of the growing outbreak, detractors of the government contend that it’s more likely that superspreader indoor events such as weddings – which the government had permitted until midnight Tuesday – were just as likely, if not more so, to contribute to the spread.

There have also been allegations of manipulated data.

“Data released by the government don’t represent actual numbers (of daily COVID-19 case). These lives that are being lost cannot be brought back,” said Samarasinghe, at the union collective’s press conference.

Samarasinghe was referring to what may be a significant discrepancy between daily COVID-19 cases confirmed by Sri Lanka’s health authorities and the number of people that actually test positive on a given day.