BENGALURU, Feb 13: Forty students of a nursing college in Bengaluru, mostly hailing from Kerala, have tested positive for coronavirus.

Following the finding of the infection, the health department is conducting a mass testing for covid in all the nursing and medical colleges in the city from February 14 to 20. It is being proposed to make it mandatory for all the students coming to the city's educational institutions to carry a negative covid test certificate not older than 72 hours.

As the colleges have opened, students hailing from other States have started coming. The State Government announced that students coming from Kerala to Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Mysuru, Kodagu and Chamarajanagar districts must have an RT-PCR negative test report.

The Manjushree College of Nursing has 210 students. It is located in Pulakeshi Nagar. All the students have been placed in isolation. Health inspection has been arranged for them once in a day and samples have been sent for genome sequencing to find any new virus variant.

While all over India the covid epidemic has shown sharp decline, Kerala continues to be the worst affected with a tally of 9,94,052 cases so far.