Coronavirus LIVE Updates: A migrant from Bihar boards a special train from Chandigarh Railway Station on Monday afternoon. (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)
Coronavirus India Live updates: With India reporting 3,604 coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, the total number of infections Tuesday crossed the 70,000-mark to reach 70,756 including the 22,454 people who have been treated and discharged so far. The death toll also rose to 2,293. According to the Home Ministry, the recovery rate stands at 31.15 per cent.
Meanwhile, the Railway services starting Tuesday will run to full capacity, while leaving it up to the passengers to maintain social distancing on board, and to states to decide the protocol on arrival. More than 54,000 passengers made reservations for their train journeys within three hours after the Indian Railways opened booking on Monday. Also, sources have told The Indian Express that Aarogya Setu app is a must for people travelling by trains. Passengers who don’t have it will be asked to download even after reaching the station.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his fifth meeting with the state chief ministers said the road ahead should be focused on reducing the spread of Covid-19 and ensuring that all precautions were taken by people, including social distancing norms, by observing ‘do gaaj doori’. Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan proposed resumption of all the domestic flights except from containment zones as further impetus to inter-state navigation. However, those with symptoms should not be allowed to board, Vijayan said.
Globally, there are over 4 million coronavirus cases, with deaths exceeding 281,000. According to Johns Hopkins data, the United States continues to be the worst-affected country with 79,894 fatalities and 1,339,819 cases, followed by United Kingdom (32,140 deaths and 224,327 cases) and Italy (30,379 deaths and 219,814 cases).
Coronavirus LIVE Updates: Medics at a government hospital in New Delhi, Monday.
A woman police officer at work at Junabazaar chowk, one of the containment areas in Pune on Monday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the nation at 8 PM today.
Over 80,000 passengers have booked tickets worth over Rs 16 crore on the special trains so far, the Indian Railways said on Tuesday, hours before the first such train is scheduled to depart from the New Delhi station for Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh. The bookings for these special trains began at 6 pm on Monday. So far, 45,533 bookings (PNRs) worth Rs 16.15 crore have been recorded for the special trains for the next seven days, the railways said, adding that around 82,317 passengers will travel against these bookings. The railways issued guidelines on Monday for 15 special trains, which will be operated from Tuesday, asking the passengers to carry their own food and linen, and arrive at stations at least 90 minutes before departure for a health screening.
Karnataka reported 42 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday (12pm). With this, the total number of positive persons in the state has gone up to 904. It includes 31 deaths and 426 discharges.
INS Jalashwa will be evacuating approximately 700 Indian nationals from Malè to Kochi on May 15, 2020, during its second repatriation sortie. Jalashwa has already repatriated 698 citizens to India on 10 May during her first sortie.
INS Magar, carrying 202 Indian nationals is likely to reach Kochi by evening today 12 May 2020 (approx 1800h)
Tamil Nadu Class X Board Exams will be held from June 1 to June 12: KA Sengottaiyan, Minister for School Education.
“Sometimes they just want someone to hear them out. They do not, mostly in such cases, ask what they should do. It is just that they want someone to listen to them,” says an executive with the state government’s helpline number for senior citizens.
The toll-free 14567 number which provides information, guidance, and emotional support to senior citizens across Telangana has witnessed almost double the number of usual grievance calls per day since the imposition of lockdown. In the last 47 days, it has received over 8,000 calls at an average of 170 calls per day. On certain days, the number of calls has gone past 500, too. Pre-lockdown, the average number of calls per day used to stay around 70. Read more
Delhi Police have received a letter from the Air India Office that a 54-year-old Air India employee working in the office in Mahadeo Road in the area of Parliament Street has been tested Covid-19 positive. He has been home quarantined. The entire Air India building has been sealed at present for sanitisation.
Projecting several scenarios for the future of the pandemic, the CIDRAP viewpoint summarised these as shown in Figure 2.
Scenario 1: The first wave in spring 2020 is followed by a series of repetitive smaller waves through the summer, and then consistently over a 1- to 2-year period, gradually diminishing sometime in 2021.
Scenario 2: The first wave in spring 2020 is followed by a larger wave in the autumn or winter of 2020 and one or more smaller subsequent waves in 2021.
Scenario 3: The first wave in spring 2020 is followed by a “slow burn” of ongoing transmission and case occurrence, but without a clear wave pattern. This pattern may vary geographically and may be influenced by mitigation measures in place.
The study in Science used US time series data for two other coronavirus infections (OC43 and HKU1), made estimates for seasonality and immunity, and prepared a model for SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
The charts in Figure 1 have been reproduced from the paper in Science, with minor modifications. Chart 1A plots a time series for prevalence of total cases and critical cases per 10,000. The dotted line represents a prevalence threshold for enforcing/removing social distancing measures, while the blue bars represent the period of social distancing. On the right, Chart 1B projects the corresponding cumulative progress towards herd immunity.
Charts 1C and 1D are to be read the same way. The difference is that the second pair of charts accounts for seasonality of outbreaks, while the first pair does not.
For the last several months, the key questions on everybody’s mind have included how long the Covid-19 pandemic will run, and whether the disease will resurface season by season. Two new studies, first reported in The New York Times, project various shapes the Covid-19 curve can take. One study, published in Science, projects that winter outbreaks will probably recur. It suggests prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022 to prevent the case load from exceeding critical care capacities.
At a time when India is focussed heavily on how to deal with COVID-19, two important scientific papers on child survival are published today by the India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative.
Findings show that under-5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) has dropped in India since 2000 by 49 per cent, but there is a 6 fold variation in the rate between the states and 11 fold variation between the districts of India. There were 1.04 million under-5 deaths in 2017, down from 2.24 million deaths in 2000. Neonatal deaths in India have reduced from 1.02 million deaths in 2000 to 0.57 million deaths in 2017. Neonatal Mortality Rate (NMR) has dropped in India since 2000 by 38%, but there is a 5 fold variation in the rate between the states and 8 fold variation between the districts of India, says Prof Lalit Dandona, Director of the India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative.
Nearly two months after it suspended its passenger operations in view of the coronavirus-induced lockdown, the Indian Railways will gradually resume passenger train services from Tuesday. A total of 15 trains for different destinations will leave New Delhi on Tuesday for which bookings have begun. The special trains will run from New Delhi to Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.
Here’s a list of the special trains that will run from today:
With almost 800 new cases on Monday, its highest-ever single day increase, Tamil Nadu has now overtaken Delhi as the state with the third biggest caseload of novel Coronavirus in the country. Tamil Nadu has now 8002 confirmed cases, while Delhi had 7233. Delhi has reported data only till Sunday. Its figure for Monday is still awaited but the state has never reported more than 450 cases in a day. Only Maharashtra and Gujarat now have more confirmed cases than Tamil Nadu, which has seen its numbers rise rapidly in the last few days, especially after the discovery of the Koyambedu market cluster in Chennai which has so far contributed more than 2,000 cases. Chennai reported over 500 cases on Monday, and it alone accounts for over half of all the cases in the state.
Tamil Nadu also reported six deaths on Monday, which too is the highest it has ever reported on a single day. Read More
The country's largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) on Tuesday said it has resumed operations at its Manesar plant in Haryana after around 40 days of closure due to the coronavirus-led lockdown. Operations at both Manesar and Gurugram facilities were suspended since March 22. "Production has commenced at the Manesar plant and the first car would roll out today (Tuesday)," Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) Chairman R C Bhargava told PTI. The facility has commenced operations on a single shift basis with up to 75 per cent employees allowed currently, he added.
“Don’t ask me. Ask China.” This is what US President Donald Trump told an American journalist before unceremoniously ending the press conference at the White House rose garden on Monday. Weijia Jiang, who works for CBS news, had challenged President Trump as to why he views coronavirus testing as a global competition given that more than 80,000 US citizens have lost their lives to the pandemic ever since its outbreak. This was Trump’s first media briefing since April 27 in the White House rose garden with signs behind him that read “America leads the world in testing.”
After initial debate, the utility of masks during the Covid-19 pandemic seems widely accepted now. The dominant scientific opinion says masks are very useful, and even relatively simple home-made masks can offer a great degree of protection against the novel coronavirus. In the last few days, several new studies have reinforced this advice with fresh evidence. These studies say the spread can be contained significantly if a large proportion of population begins to use these masks. A look at the findings on their utility in possibly eliminating Covid, reducing lockdown periods and blocking out droplets.
Twelve flights carrying Indian nationals will be arriving today- AI 1375 Manila to Ahmedabad, AI 162 London to Hyderabad, AI 144 Newark-Mumbai-Ahmedabad, AI 0381 Singapore to Delhi, AI 1242 Dhaka to Srinagar, AI 1924 Dammam to Kochi, AI 1377 Kuala Lumpur to Mumbai, AI 1375 Manila to Delhi, IX 350 Muscat to Chennai, IX 814 Dubai to Kannur, IX 384 Dubai to Mangalore and IX 485 Singapore-Bengaluru-Kochi.
As many 169 Indian students to return to Jammu and Kashmir's Srinagar from Bangladesh's Dhaka today, on an Air India special flight.
The benchmark equity indices on the BSE and National Stock Exchange (NSE) opened over 1 per cent loweron Tuesday taking cues from their broader Asian peers which slipped on growing worries about a second wave of coronavirus infections after the Chinese city where the pandemic originated reported its first new cases since its lockdown was lifted. At 9:15 am, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 393.59 points (1.25 per cent) at 31,167.63, while the Nifty 50 was at 9,134.55, down 104.65 points (1.13 per cent).