NEWSALERT
There are 70 districts in 16 states where there has been more than 150 per cent rise in COVID-19 cases from March 1 to 15: Govt. PTI PLB UZM AAR AAR
There are 70 districts in 16 states where there has been more than 150 per cent rise in COVID-19 cases from March 1 to 15: Govt. PTI PLB UZM AAR AAR
Karnataka witnessed highest single-day spike of 21,794 COVID-19 cases and 149 related fatalities on Tuesday.
The new restrictions will remain in force throughout the state of Maharashtra from 8pm on April 22 till 7 am on May 1.
Just 4 out of 10k people who were administered both doses of Covaxin and 3 out of 10k recipients of both doses of Covishield turned positive after inoculation
Pfizer said during the pandemic phase it will supply the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 mRNA vaccine only through government contracts.
Edu Bedia scored FC Goa's first goal in AFC Champions League.
Russia is ready to start building its own space station with the aim of launching it into orbit by 2030 if President Vladimir Putin gives the goahead, the head of its Roscosmos space agency said on Wednesday.
The Chennai Super Kings batted well (220/3) at the Wankhede after being sent in by Kolkata Knight Riders skipper Eoin Morgan in match number 15 of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2021 season.CSK openers Ruturaj Gaikwad and Faf du Plessis struck respective fifties to lead their side.On a good batting surface, the KKR bowlers concede aplenty.Here's the mid-innings report.
Washington [US], April 22 (ANI): For fully vaccinated people, the risk of still getting COVID-19 -- described as "breakthrough infections" -- remains extremely low, according to a recent study.
Farmer leaders said it is a ploy to defame the agitation, adding health team swill declare some of them as infected and brand all of them as super spreaders.
This phase will witness the stiff competition between the ruling Trinamool Congress and its main rival BJP
The Army and the IAF are already engaged in several parts of the country as India battles a dire COVID-19 situation.
Three goals in 10 minutes towards the end of the first half helped Madrid go top of the table on head-to-head, above Atletico Madrid, who play at home to Huesca on Thursday.
The RNA virus has the potential to acquire mutations as it replicates and spreads.
German automaker Mercedes-Benz has unveiled the Long Wheel Base (LWB) version of its new C-Class sedan at the Shanghai Auto Show 2021. It is unclear whether it will make its way to India. The vehicle sports certain cosmetic updates inside-out and is offered with a choice of two petrol engines linked to a 9-speed automatic gearbox. Here are more details.
With government giving manufacturers and importers pricing freedom, SII has said that Covishield vaccine will be priced at Rs 400 per dose for state governments and Rs 600 for private hospitals.
Despite enforcing one of the strictest lockdowns last year, the authorities seem unable to cope with a renewed Covid surge A sign in Mumbai, India: ‘The vaccination programme is far behind its targets.’ Photograph: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters At 7.52pm on 16 April, Vinay Srivastava, a 65-year-old freelance journalist in Lucknow, the capital city of India’s largest state Uttar Pradesh, tweeted the state’s chief minister Yogi Adityanath that his oxygen levels had fallen to 52, but no hospital, doctor or lab was picking up the phone. His symptoms pointed to Covid-19, but he was unable to get a test, and his son went from hospital to hospital through the night, pleading in vain for a bed for his father. At 3.15pm the next day, Srivastava tweeted the chief minister’s media adviser: “Now my oxygen is 31 when some will come.” Minutes later he was dead. He had never been tested, and his family would have to wait hours for an ambulance to take his body away. Srivastava’s tweets of his descent transfixed and horrified India’s Twitter users. But whether online or offline, one thing has become abundantly clear to all Indians over the last week: the second wave has grown to a tsunami, and the state is unable to cope. Although the first cases were detected in the country as early as January 2020, India only reached one million confirmed cases on 16 July last year. Until the beginning of June 2020, new cases remained under 10,000 each day. In March last year, the government enforced one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, which lasted for two months. Although these restrictions came at significant costs, some parts of India were able to use this time to build up their healthcare capacity. Yet the country’s healthcare resources remain acutely constrained. India is ranked 155 of 167 countries on its hospital bed density , and every medical doctor in India caters to at least 1,511 people, while there is only one nurse to every 670 people (the World Health Organization recommends one doctor per 1,000 people, and one nurse for every 300) The surge, when it came in July and August 2020, was swift, but just as quickly it appeared to be over. By the middle of September, new detected cases declined steadily, hospitalisations fell and deaths declined sharply. If India had then attempted a scientific assessment of its first wave, there might have been lessons for the future. It would have found that many people were still vulnerable to the virus. India’s most recent nationwide sero-survey conducted during December 2020 and January 2021 indicated that more than one in five Indians had been exposed to the virus, but the proportion of those with antibodies in urban slums was over twelve percentage points higher than in rural areas. While officially recorded deaths appeared to show that India’s mortality from Covid was far below that in much of the developed world, government authorities largely ignored warnings from the first wave: the death report infrastructure was underpowered at the best of times, and health authorities were actively undercounting Covid deaths. Official mortality data was last recorded in 2018. Despite its world-class genomic sequencing infrastructure, India also fell far behind on this front. It did virtually no sequencing between July and December 2020, Gagandeep Kang, one of India’s most respected virologists, told me. Even since then, India has sequenced less than 1% of total Covid-19 samples between January and March 2021, citing a lack of funds. This means that many important questions about the Indian outbreak can’t be answered – there are hypotheses that the new “double mutant” variant that originated in India, and is now the UK’s fastest growing variant, could be more transmissible or evade immunity, but there is little evidence to substantiate this yet. Other hypotheses around the new surge include a high rate of reinfections and breakthrough infections in people who are already vaccinated, but again no data is yet available. Instead, there was triumphalism. “India has successfully contained the pandemic,” health minister Harsh Vardhan said at the end of January 2021. In 2020, prime minister Narendra Modi had given every indication of having taken the virus deadly seriously. Unlike other global leaders, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Modi was relentlessly on-message, always appearing masked. Yet after the September decline, everyone appeared to throw caution to the winds. Since the beginning of March 2021, Modi has led a seemingly interminable election in five Indian states, continuing to address massive rallies even after his opponents have suspended campaigning because of rising case numbers. Modi has even praised the big crowds he is pulling. His government has also permitted the Kumbh Mela, a once-in-12 years Hindu religious gathering, to be moved from 2022 to 2021 on account of “auspicious dates”. Over one million people have visited the site every day since 11 March, even as local authorities admitted that it was difficult to maintain Covid rules at the gathering. The current case numbers have far surpassed India’s first peak. Since 17 April, India has reported more than 200,000 new cases each day, and the numbers keep rising. Most hospitals in India’s major cities – and many smaller ones – are overrun. Oxygen is in particularly short supply, even as health authorities suggested that more people in the second wave were reporting shortness of breath. Last year, Modi set up an opaque fund into which charitable donations poured in, and set aside money for 162 oxygen plants. It took the government eight months to invite bids; as of 18 April, only 33 plants had been installed and only a handful were functioning. Indians have stepped into the void left by the state, rigging up oxygen cylinders for their families, organising via spreadsheets to get drugs to those who need them and setting up mini control rooms to coordinate bed availability. In a televised address on Tuesday night, Modi invited comparisons to his address announcing a lockdown with four hours’ notice in March 2020. This time, however, the prime minister had no shock and awe on offer, but little by way of concrete relief either, apart from a previously announced expansion of the vaccination programme that is currently far behind its targets. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Modi has attempted to frame the crisis as a collective experience that Indians are in together. But over the last weeks, it has been abundantly clear to most Indians that they are truly on their own. Rukmini S is a data journalist based in Chennai, India
Brigadier Rashpal Singh Parmar (retd) could not be admitted in any Delhi hospital, including the ones set up by Army
New Delhi, Apr 22 (PTI) CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Thursday said his son Ashish died of COVID-19 in the morning.
The latest iMac is powered by Apple’s M1 chip.
Newspapers warn that the situation shows no sign of improving, and calls on warring politicians to cooperate to beat the virusSee all our coronavirus coverage An ambulance outside Lok Nayak Jaiprakash Narayan hospital in New Delhi, India. India papers describe sense of urgency in tackling the Covid surge. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images India’s media has reacted with despair as the country set a new world record for daily cases of Covid-19 amid a devastating new wave of the pandemic. The Hindustan Times leads with the stark headline “World’s worst outbreak”, detailing how the country’s tally of 314,835 cases on Wednesday was the highest daily total recorded by any country. It surpasses a mark set by the United States in January. With a sense of national emergency engulfing the world’s second most populous country, the paper suggested that the situation was likely to get worse before it gets better. “The most worrying factor right now remains how fast daily cases are continuing to grow,” it reports, “and how the trajectory is exhibiting no clear signs of approaching a peak still”. Hindustan Times. Photograph: Hindustan Times The Indian Express, which is based in Chennai, leads with comments on Wednesday by Delhi high court judges exhorting hospitals to “Beg, borrow, steal to get oxygen”. The Max Healthcare network had sought intervention from the courts in frustration at the “dangerously low” oxygen supplies in hospitals. Justices Vipin Sanghi and Rekha Palli said it was a “national emergency”, the paper reports, telling the court: “We are shocked and dismayed that the government does not seem to be seeing the reality … What is happening? Why is the government not waking up to the reality.” The paper’s editorial said the resistance of prime minister Narendra Modi to another lockdown was “welcome”, but said: “Because for all the talk of a no-lockdown, no demand or economic activity will revive if the Covid curve doesn’t begin to bend.” The Covid wave has claimed a number of high-profile victims in India with the former prime minister Manmohan Singh falling sick this week. It has also claimed the lives of a former senior Congress party leader Dr AK Walia, the Times of India tweeted, and the son of Communist party leader Sitaram Yechury. The Times of India said that as the national crisis mounts, more cooperation was needed between the central government and state governments, and between the states themselves, to pull the country back from the brink. In an editorial, the Times decried the lack of preparedness among all levels of government and says that when the time comes for a postmortem into the handling of the pandemic, “state and central governments must answer for low public health budgets”. “All hands must be on deck,” it says. “India started the pandemic with shortages of masks, PPE kits and testing infrastructure but quickly scaled up. Today’s crisis can be tided over too with a spirit of humaneness, cooperation and accommodation. Let the politics take a back seat.” The Hindu. Photograph: The Hindu The Hindu leads with the tragic story of 24 people killed by an oxygen leak, and also reports on how the central government was planning to intervene to ensure oxygen supplies to Delhi.