Thermal screening of passengers being conducted as a precautionary measure against the coronavirus, at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in Mumbai on Thursday.
(Express Photo by Ganesh Shirsekar)
Coronavirus India Live Updates: Over a month after India commenced its Covid-19 inoculation drive, 1 crore vaccinations have been administered so far. Union Health Ministry data shows an uneven pattern of distribution, with several states and Union Territories injecting doses to less than 50 per cent of their target frontline workers. Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Punjab are among the larger states yet to reach 50 per cent vaccine coverage.
In other news, after 19 days, India recorded over 13,000 in the 24 hours ending 9 am Friday. The country’s total caseload now stands at over 1.09 crore, of which over 1.06 crore patients have recovered from the disease. The toll increased to 1,56,111 with 97 deaths yesterday.
Covid-19 variants detected in South Africa and Brazil were found in five persons who had returned to India on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, strict restrictions have been reimposed in five districts of Maharashtra’s Amravati division –Amravati, Akola, Yavatmal, Buldana and Washim — with a partial lockdown in two of them after Covid-19 cases shot up there.
In another development, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Thursday suggested the creation of a regional platform for collating and studying data on the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines, a special visa scheme for doctors and nurses to travel within the region during health emergencies among other things.
(AP Photo/R S Iyer)
The city’s Covid graph over the past month has given healthcare workers a much needed breather. However, with the number of cases increasing in several cities and towns in Maharashtra, Delhi government officials have warned against complacency.
Between mid-January and mid-February the city’s positivity rate has remained under 0.5%, which experts say indicates that the spread has slowed down by a considerable degree.
The number of samples collected in a day, however, has also dipped from around 75,000 a day in November to 57,000 per day after the last month. (Read more here)
Amid a rising number of daily Covid-19 cases in Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday issued fresh guidelines to make implementation of Covid norms more stringent, including limited gathering during marriages, fines for face mask violations, hand-stamps on home-quarantine patients, and sealing of buildings where five or more cases are found.
Institutional quarantine has been made compulsory for travellers from Brazil along with existing mandate to quarantine travellers from UK, European Countries, and the Middle East.
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Ever since the coronavirus numbers began to dip, scientists and health experts have been warning that there is no room for people to let their guard down against a virus as unpredictable as this one. They have underlined the real possibility of resurgence and of new strains of the virus emerging in other countries reaching India. But for the most part, this advice has been treated with a certain optimistic disbelief by a people impatient for a return to the pre-COVID-19 normal. The steady fall in numbers in this country even as the disease was rising and raging in several other countries has also encouraged the notion that India is somehow immune to the trends being witnessed elsewhere. The trends in Maharashtra in the last few days, however, are an indication of the prescience of scientists and health experts, and of the perils of complacency.
IN THE second phase of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, the Bengal government will start registration of all state government employees to ensure Covid vaccination coverage to maximum state government employees and parastatals on priority basis.
Announcing this at Nabanna on Thursday, Chief Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay said that earlier a priority list containing names of seven lakh employees, including health workers, police, municipal workers and other state government employees, who are frontline workers, were prepared.(Read more here)