While Uttar Pradesh on Monday carried out over one lakh novel Coronavirus tests in a single day, there are many states which are still to step up their testing rate. Several of these states, including those who have caseloads more than 20,000, are testing less than 15,000 samples every day.

Among states with bigger caseloads that are lagging behind include Telangana, Bihar, Haryana, West Bengal, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. Gujarat has not been doing very well either. Of these, Telangana has carried out less than four lakh tests right now, while Bihar and Odisha both have less than five lakh tests.

More than 16.67 million people have been infected with the virus, while nearly 6.6 lakh people have died. Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.

A World Health Organisation official on Tuesday described the COVID-19 pandemic as “one big wave” and warned against complacency in the northern hemisphere summer since the infection does not share influenza’s tendency to follow seasons. WHO officials have been at pains to avoid describing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases like those in Hong Kong as “waves” as this suggests the virus is behaving in ways beyond human control, when in fact concerted action can slow its spread. “The virus likes all seasons,” the official said. Follow GLOBAL updates here

Eleven people, including six Border Security Force (BSF) personnel and a policeman, have tested positive for COVID-19 in Mizoram, taking the state's tally to 395, a health department official said on Wednesday. Of the fresh cases, 10 were reported from Aizawl district and one from Lawngtlai, he said.

"Swab samples of these people were tested at the Zoram Medical College (ZMC) here and they were found positive for the disease on Tuesday night. Of the new patients, nine have returned from West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Bihar and Assam and two from Nepal," the official said. Of the 395 cases, 197 are active while 198 people have recovered from the disease, he said.

For the first time in over three months, only 7.9 per cent of those tested in Mumbai in a day were found to be Covid-19 positive.

Mumbai on Tuesday saw 8,776 people being tested, the highest number of tests conducted in the city in a single day so far. Of these, only 700 – 7.9 per cent of those who were tested – were found to be infected.

“Mumbai’s doubling rate (of cases) is now 68 days,” BMC Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal said. The city on Tuesday recorded 55 deaths due to Covid-19, taking its toll to 6,187. The total number of cases climbed to 1.10 lakh.

India’s coronavirus cases crossed the 15 lakh-mark to reach 1,531,669 on Wednesday. The total number of death toll in the country reached 34,193. As many as 48,512 cases and 768 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours. Of the total, 5,09,447 are active cases while 9,88,029 people have been treated and discharged so far.

President Donald Trump issued a stout defense Tuesday of a disproved use of a malaria drug as a treatment for the coronavirus, hours after social media companies moved to take down videos promoting its use as potentially harmful misinformation.

The president, in a marked shift from the more measured approach he’s taken toward the virus in recent days, took to Twitter to promote hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and to amplify criticism of Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. In a White House briefing, Trump defended his decision to promote a viral video of a group of doctors promoting the use of the drug Monday, even though his own administration withdrew emergency authorization for its use against the coronavirus.

“I think they’re very respected doctors,” Trump said, adding they believed in the drug. “There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it.”

With train services remaining indefinitely suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Indian Railways has estimated a loss of around Rs 40,000 crore in its passenger business for this fiscal, the Rail Ministry has informed.

To make good this loss, the railways is aiming to increase its freight-loading target this financial year by around 50 per cent from last year, Railway Board chairman V K Yadav said Tuesday.

“The passenger segment is not doing well, everybody knows. We are just running 230 trains and they are hardly full. We do not know how the corona (pandemic) will unfold. But we are expecting only 10-15 per cent earnings from passenger segment and that means around Rs 35-40,000 crore we will lose. We are trying to make up for that through freight revenue,” Yadav said in an online interaction with the media.

Moderna Inc.’s vaccine candidate against Covid-19 protected against the virus in a trial that inoculated 16 monkeys, an encouraging step on the path to a defense for humans against the pandemic. Two injections of the vaccine protected against heavy exposure to the virus at two different levels of dosage, Moderna said in findings published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The primates didn’t show any sign of creating enhanced disease, a problem that has occasionally been associated with vaccines.

The results, if they hold up in humans, suggest that the vaccine may be able to protect against Covid-19 in both the upper and lower airways. In all the monkeys who got the high doses of the vaccine, no viral replication was detectable in their noses two days after being challenged with the virus, according to the study results. And no viral replication was seen in the lung fluid of 7 of 8 animals in both dose groups after being challenged with the virus. All 16 monkeys showed at least some sign of protection, with limited lung inflammation seen in the lungs of both groups.

Of those who died after contracting Covid-19 between June 1 and June 12, 67% arrived in hospitals in a critical condition and died within four days of admission. And, according to data shared by the Delhi government, 34% died within 24 hours of admission.

A month on, between July 1 and 12, the percentage of people dying within four days of admission dipped to 37%, and of those dying within 24 hours to 15%.

Earlier this month, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had sought a report on Covid-19 deaths in the city. While the first report focussed patients prescribed home isolation, the health department was then told to analyse other parameters as well. Read more here

The huge volume of samples, the time taken for results to come and the reluctance of suspected cases to quarantine themselves are contributing to spread of Covid-19 in Andhra Pradesh, according to state health officials.

According to the officials, the test results are taking at least four days to come and people whose samples have been collected are not staying in quarantine till the results come in. “Our testing numbers are high. Large-scale spread is happening because test results take at least four days to come and people refuse to stay at home till the results are out,” Dr A Srikant, the state’s nodal officer for Covid-19, told The Indian Express.

“While the results are awaited, those infected are unknowingly spreading it to others. Only after the result comes positive, they go into quarantine at home or at Covid centres. This is the reason infection is spreading so quickly,” he said. Read more here

With 86,518 tests conducted per million population, Aurangabad city is performing the maximum number of tests per million in Maharashtra.

The city, which has a population of 11.75 lakh as per the 2011 Census and a substantial number of industrial units, has relied heavily on antigen testing to screen those entering its limits and isolating them before the infection could spread. Till now, Aurangabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has conducted 1.03 lakh tests – 67,148 antigen tests and 34,907 RT-PCR tests.

The city has reported 9,827 Covid-19 cases, reflecting a 10 per cent positivity rate. On a daily basis, AMC is conducting around 5,250 tests. Of them, 5,000 are antigen tests.

Karnataka Medical Education Minister K Sudhakar Tuesday said that the state is likely to adopt a centralised system in place to classify asymptomatic, symptomatic and mild symptomatic persons. “Treatment based on the severity of the cases will be recommended using the same,” Sudhakar said.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths linked to the pandemic in the state breached the 2000-mark Tuesday as 102 more fatalities in the last few days were linked to the pandemic. Of the total 2055 deaths so far, 957 are from Bengaluru. The other districts with most deaths to date are Mysuru (123), Dakshina Kannada (116), and Dharwad (109). Follow Karnataka LIVE updates here

New Zealand's government says it will rush through new laws to allow some people to be charged for their border quarantine costs. New Zealand hasn't had any community transmission of the virus for three months, and everybody who enters the country is required to spend two weeks isolated at a hotel. The cost of that is currently picked up by taxpayers and has already amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Under the new law, adults who leave or enter the country for short holidays or business trips will be required to pay about 3,100 New Zealand dollars (USD 2,100) toward their quarantine costs. But there will be many exceptions to the new fees, and officials acknowledge it will affect less than 10 per cent of travellers. Minister Megan Woods said the government was carefully balancing the payments against the rights of New Zealanders to return home permanently. --AP

Reflecting the extent of the coronavirus spread in Uttar Prdaesh, at least nine districts reported more than 100 new Covid cases and three of them over 200 cases on Tuesday.

Of 3,490 fresh cases recorded in Uttar Pradesh in the last 24 hours, Bareilly logged the highest cases at 335, followed by 268 in Kanpur Nagar, 247 in Lucknow, 191 in Jaunpur, 138 in Varanasi, 125 in Prayagraj, 114 in Gautam Buddh Nagar, 109 in Moradabad and 101 in Lakhimpur Kheri. The figure for Bareilly was also its highest single-day jump, taking active cases to 1,165. Tuesday’s addition took the total caseload to 73,951.

At least 41 fresh deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, taking the total death count to 1,497. I Six deaths each were reported from Varanasi and Bareilly, five from Kanpur Nagar, three from Lucknow, two each from Basti, Hardoi, Moradabad and Prayagraj, and one each from Jhansi, Gorakhpur, Sambhal, Saharapur, Rampur, Shahjahanpur, Sant Kabir Nagar, Unnao, Mainpuri, Sultanpur, Farrukhabad, Balrampur and Ambedkarnagar.

The restrictions on travel and movement are set to be eased on August 1, but the Taj Mahal and other monuments in Agra are unlikely to be opened for visitors any time soon due to the number of cases in the city.

Sources told The Indian Express that the Taj Mahal won’t be reopened before August 15, or even a week or two beyond that, depending on the situation on the ground. Earlier in July, Union Culture Minister Prahlad Patel, in an attempt to revive the tourism sector that has been hit hard due to the Covid-19 pandemic, had tweeted that all heritage sites and monuments would reopen starting July 6, following strict guidelines pertaining to Covid-19. The minister had, however, added that the monuments will be opened in “compliance of the state and district administration”.

On July 6, as the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) opened more than 2,000 centrally protected monuments across the country, the Taj Mahal and other monuments in Agra remained shut, with the district administration expressing concern over the spread of the virus.

A World Health Organization official on Tuesday described the COVID-19 pandemic as “one big wave” and warned against complacency in the northern hemisphere summer since the infection does not share influenza’s tendency to follow seasons.

WHO officials have been at pains to avoid describing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases like those in Hong Kong as “waves” as this suggests the virus is behaving in ways beyond human control, when in fact concerted action can slow its spread.

Margaret Harris repeated that message in a virtual briefing in Geneva. “We are in the first wave. It’s going to be one big wave. It’s going to go up and down a bit. The best thing is to flatten it and turn it into just something lapping at your feet,” she said. Read more here

A sero-survey conducted in Mumbai showed that more than half the people, or 57 per cent, tested in slums had been exposed to and developed antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 virus as compared to only 16 per cent of those tested in residential societies. The survey, conducted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation in three wards of Mumbai, was done on 6,936 people – 61 per cent of them slum-dwellers and the remaining 39 per cent in residential societies.

The survey also found that more women than men had developed antibodies. Among people in slums, 59.3 per cent of the2,297 women tested, and 53.2 per cent of the 1,937 men tested had antibodies against Covid. In non-slum areas, 16.8 per cent of women tested and 14.9 per cent of men tested had developed antibodies.

However, until now, RT-PCR tests in Mumbai had showed more men (55 per cent) getting infected than women (45 per cent).

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