Santiago, Dec 12 (IANS): Chile's Ministry of Health has urged residents of the capital Santiago and Metropolitan region to comply with weekend lockdown measures to curb the rise in Covid cases.

"The measures adopted for the Metropolitan region are preventive and we hope that they will be transitory, since they are precisely intended to avoid much more extreme measures," Chile's Minister of Health Enrique Paris told the media.

The spike in cases forced officials to reimpose partial lockdowns on the area's 7 million residents, including closing non-essential businesses.

Paris said on Thursday the situation was "critical."

In its daily pandemic report, the Ministry of Health said tests detected 1,531 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, with a total of 567,974 infections since the start of the outbreak in Chile in early March.

The country's Covid-19 death toll stands at 15,782 after eight more patients died in the same 24 hours.