Coronavirus India Live Updates: 56 prison inmates test positive in UP; Russian vaccine could be approved this week

Any air traveller to Assam who will depart from the state within 72 hours of his arrival will not have to undergo quarantine provided his Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) result at the airport is negative, an order issued by the state government said on Monday.

Passengers will also have to provide a copy of his return ticket indicating his departure within 72 hours, the order said.

The visitor shall provide swab samples for Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) immediately on arrival and if the result is negative, then he will be allowed to proceed. But if the result is positive, then he will have to proceed for isolation or treatment as per the protocol for Covid-19 patients.

Odisha registered its highest single-day spike in COVID-19 deaths on Monday as 14 patients succumbed to the disease, while 1,528 new infections pushed its caseload to 47,455, a health official said.

The fresh fatalities have taken the COVID-19 death toll in the state to 286, he said.

Ganjam district, Odisha's COVID-19 hotspot, reported six of the 14 fatalities, while Khurda and Nayagarh registered three deaths each and two patients succumbed to the infection in Sundergarh and Rayagada districts, the official said. (PTI)

Fifty minutes of dry heat in an electric cooker, such as a rice cooker or Instant Pot, could effectively sanitise N95 respirator masks, while maintaining their filtration and fit, researchers, including one of Indian origin, have found.

According to the findings published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, this could enable wearers to safely reuse limited supplies of the respirators, originally intended to be one-time-use items. N95 respirator masks are the gold standard of personal protective equipment that protect the wearer against airborne droplets and particles, such as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The Mumbai civic body has started the second phase of sero-surveillance study in the city from Monday to assess the spread of COVID-19 and how many people have developed antibodies against the disease. The survey will cover F-North (Dadar, Matunga and Dharavi), M-West (Deonar and Govandi) and R-North (Dahisar) wards, where a similar study was conducted last month, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) official said. The study will provide information about the spread of the infection and also throw light on herd immunity, he said. "The sero-surveillance study will give an insight into the spread of COVID-19 and development of antibodies. The paper work for the survey has begun from today," Additional Municipal Commissioner Suresh Kakani said.

Stressing that a “deep and prolonged economic slowdown” was “inevitable” in India, former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh on Monday spelled out three steps that the Narendra Modi-led NDA government should immediately take to stem the damage of the coronavirus pandemic.

The former prime minister also laid out three steps he believed can restore economic normalcy in the coming years. According to Singh, the government must “ensure people’s livelihoods are protected and they have spending power through significant direct cash assistance”. The Centre must also make adequate capital available for businesses through “government-backed credit guarantee programmes”. Lastly, Singh said, the government should fix the financial sector through “institutional autonomy and processes.”

At least 56 inmates of two prisons in Bareilly of Uttar Pradesh have tested positive for COVID-19, officials said. "Reports of 51 inmates of central jail and five inmates of district jail have been found positive for COVID-19" District Surveillance Officer, Ashok Kumar said. Inmates of the prisons were tested after an inmate of the central jail died due to COVID-19, he said. The district has so far reported 3,773 coronavirus cases with 98 deaths. Meanwhile, according to a report from Banda, a journalist died due to COVID-19 on Sunday.

New locally transmitted cases of coronavirus in China fell to just 14 over the past 24 hours, the National Health Commission reported Monday. The low figure was offset, however, by 35 cases brought into the country by Chinese travellers from overseas arriving in seven different cities and provinces across the country. All the cases of local transmission were in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, whose main city Urumqi is the centre of China's latest outbreak. Tightened restrictions on travel, widespread testing and a lockdown on some residential communities appear to have been effective in bringing down numbers of new infections in Urumqi, while a separate outbreak in the northeastern city of Dalian seems to have run its course.

Former president Pranab Mukherjee today tested positive for coronavirus. Mukherjee had gone to the hospital for a separate procedure, he tweeted

On a visit to the hospital for a separate procedure, I have tested positive for COVID19 today.
I request the people who came in contact with me in the last week, to please self isolate and get tested for COVID-19. #CitizenMukherjee

— Pranab Mukherjee (@CitiznMukherjee) August 10, 2020

Sri Lanka on Monday fully reopened schools after keeping them closed for over four months due to the lockdown imposed in the country to contain the spread of the coronavirus. All schools in the island nation were shut mid-March when Lanka detected its first COVID-19 infection. Schools were re-opened for selected grades in July but were closed again after few days following the threat of a fresh outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Schools with less than 200 students will operate as it used to before the pandemic lockdown in March. They will conduct classes as usual, while maintaining the 1-metre social distancing norm. However, schools with over 200 students would decide which grades should attend on which date due to the need to maintain social distancing as instructed by the health guidelines, Chithrananda said. School canteens are not permitted to open until confirmation from health authorities on COVID-19 being fully controlled, officials said.

West Bengal reported 54 more fatalities on Sunday, pushing the death toll in the state to 2,059, PTI quoted the state health department as saying. At least 2,939 new cases were recorded, raising the total number of cases to 95,554, the bulletin said. Around 67,120 patients have recovered from the disease, while 26,375 cases are active.

An Israeli jewelry company is working on what it says will be the world’s most expensive coronavirus mask, a gold, diamond-encrusted face covering with a price tag of USD 1.5 million. The 18-karat white gold mask will be decorated with 3,600 white and black diamonds and fitted with top-rated N99 filters at the request of the buyer, said designer Isaac Levy. Levy, owner of the Yvel company, said the buyer had two other demands: that it be completed by the end of the year, and that it would be the priciest in the world.

The toll in the hotel fire in Vijayawada could have been much higher had the fire station not been so close and the firefighters not risked their lives to rescue Covid-19 patients trapped inside. The firemen were initially unaware it was a Covid-19 facility. Firefighters of Vijayawada Fire Station, located about 1.5 km from the hotel, reached the spot within four minutes of getting a call. All 43 firemen who were part of the rescue operation have been sent to 14-day quarantine.

Going by Russia’s previous announcements, a Coronavirus vaccine candidate, being developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute, is expected to win regulatory approval this week. It would become the first novel Coronavirus vaccine to get approval for public use, though a Chinese vaccine has already been approved for “limited use”. The Chinese vaccine is being used only on army personnel right now.

Russia has previously said that the vaccine being developed by Gamaleya Institute in collaboration with the country’s defence ministry would be approved by August 12, and that it would be made available for public use by September. The country plans to start mass vaccinations starting October. The superfast speed at which it has been produced — other candidates are unlikely to appear on the horizon before at least the end of the year — has led to scepticism regarding the safety and effectiveness of the Russian vaccine. Especially so, since the human trials for the vaccine, which takes several years in normal circumstances, have been completed in less than two months.

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New research has found that Covid-19 patients have abnormal liver test results at high rates. While this has also been shown in previous studies, the rates have now been found to be much higher.

Previous studies in China found that approximately 15% of Covid-19 patients 19 had abnormal liver tests. The new study by Yale Liver Center, which looked retrospectively at 1,827 COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized in the Yale New Haven Health system between March and April, found that the incidence of abnormal liver tests was between 41.6% and 83.4% of patients, depending on the specific test. The new study appears in Hepatology. It also found that higher levels of liver enzymes — proteins released when the liver is damaged — were associated with poorer outcomes for these patients, including ICU admission, mechanical ventilation, and death.

With 62,064 new cases reported in the last 24 hours, the total caseload in India has now risen to 22,15,075. Of these, 6,34,945 are active cases, while 15,35,744 patients have already been discharged, data from the Union Health Ministry showed. As many as 1007 deaths were reported, taking the casualties to 44,386. For the last four days, now, Covid-19 cases have in India have risen by over 60,000.

Britain has recorded more than 1,000 new coronavirus infections in a day for the first time since late June. Government statistics say 1,062 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in the 24 hours until Sunday. The last time the number was over 1,000 was on June 26. The number of patients hospitalised with the virus continues to decline, as does the daily number of deaths. Eight new COVID-19 fatalities were reported Sunday. Britain’s official coronavirus death toll stands at 46,574, the highest in Europe.

With nearly 30,000 new coronavirus cases and over 330 deaths linked to the virus recorded in the past seven days, the week ending Sunday saw the highest jump in Covid infection and fatalities in Uttar Pradesh.

In the last five days of this week, over 4,000 cases were recorded — Sunday added 4,687 new cases and 45 deaths — taking the cumulative count to 1,22,609, the sixth-highest in the country after Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Delhi. Uttar Pradesh now accounts for 5,5 per cent of the total cases in the country.

While the weekly average growth rate dropped by nearly one percentage point to 4.6 per cent, a welcome trend, the number of active cases grew by over 10,000 cases.

Microsoft Corp. founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said it’s “mind-blowing” that the US government hasn’t improved Covid-19 testing that he described as slow and lacking fair access. “You’re paying billions of dollars in this very inequitable way to get the most worthless test results of any country in the world,” Gates said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday. “No other country has this testing insanity.”

Gates cited long lines at commercial labs and delays in obtaining test results, meaning that “you pay as much for the late result as the timely result.” Meanwhile, “very wealthy people have access to these quick-turnaround tests,” he said.